Wisereads Vol. 138 — The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, the cost of outsourcing curiosity, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. This week, we’re sharing a preview of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, a collection of essays that look for the wonder in everyday life.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.

Minas Karamanis · ergosphere.blog

Researcher Minas Karamanis illustrates how AI outsourcing quietly erodes the learning that credentials cannot measure. "We have built an entire evaluation system around counting things that can be counted, and it turns out that what actually matters is the one thing that can't be."

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

Lalit Maganti · Lalit Maganti

Google engineer Lalit Maganti shares what actually works in AI-assisted development, from eight years of false starts. "The takeaway for me is simple: AI is an incredible force multiplier for implementation, but it’s a dangerous substitute for design."

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz · The New Yorker

In a deeply reported New Yorker piece, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz scrutinize whether Sam Altman is a trustworthy steward for AGI, drawing on insider accounts from OpenAI’s tumultuous past year. "Even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his 'hope for humanity' ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Can AI Actually Organize Your Files? (Claude Code + PARA)

Tiago Forte

Bestselling author Tiago Forte tests Claude Code's ability to organize files using the PARA productivity method he developed. "You can't just give them access to the entire file system. So you have to pick and choose which little bits of context, which folders you are going to make available to the AI. But then that raises the question, how are you going to organize that file system?"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

LLM Knowledge Bases

Andrej Karpathy

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy outlines a hands-on workflow for building a personal research wiki that an LLM maintains, queries, and continually improves. "Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough ... you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Industrial Policy For The Intelligence Age: Ideas To Keep People First

OpenAI

OpenAI sketches a policy blueprint for the transition to superintelligence, arguing for democratic governance, broad access, worker voice, and strong safeguards. "The transition to superintelligence is not a distant possibility—it's already underway, and the choices we make in the near term will shape how its benefits and risks are distributed for decades to come."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay

Award-winning poet Ross Gay spends a year noticing small joys, from sidewalks to gardens, to show how attention can reorient a life. In brief, luminous entries, he blends tenderness, humor, and grief, inviting readers to practice delight as a daily ritual.

"The discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study."

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $2.99 through the end of April.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Fiction Matters

Sara Hildreth writes Fiction Matters, a Substack about books, reading habits, and what it means to write well. From Reading in Public No. 96: Is AI changing how we define what it means to write?: "Whether you hate the writing process or love it, whether you draft beautifully worded creative fiction or helpful advice for your readers, if you show up, think through the ideas, and struggle through the language, you are a writer. Defining yourself as such allows you to hold onto what only you can do as a human. Because the world doesn’t need more generated text. It doesn’t need more content created. It needs your humanity."

Wisereads Vol. 137 — David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, Cal Newport on the crisis of shallow thinking, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson. This week, we’re sharing a preview of David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This.

Cal Newport · New York Times

Georgetown computer science professor and Deep Work author Cal Newport argues for a coordinated push to protect our ability to think amid smartphones, social media, and AI. "I’m done ceding my brain — the core of all that makes me who I am — to the financial interests of a small number of technology billionaires or the shortsighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It’s time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it."

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Mario Zechner · mariozechner.at

Mario Zechner, creator of libGDX and longtime software engineer, urges caution when using AI coding agents, warning that unchecked autonomy creates brittle, unmaintainable systems. "With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase."

I Saw Something New in San Francisco

Ezra Klein · New York Times

Ezra Klein, New York Times opinion columnist and author of Why We're Polarized, considers the growing trend to "write for the A.I." and how intimate, ever-attentive systems might reshape personal thought and identity. "What makes A.I. truly persuasive isn’t that it praises our ideas or insights, it’s that it restates and extends them in a more compelling form than we initially offered, and does so while reflecting a polished image of ourselves back at us."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

Y Combinator

On Y Combinator’s Lightcone podcast, a candid interview with Anthropic engineer Boris Cherny reflects on how Claude Code emerged from rapid iteration, dogfooding, and watching real users. "Honestly it's just been so exciting and humbling, seeing how people are using Claude Code. I just wanted to build a cool thing and it ended up being really useful."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

From Hierarchy to Intelligence

Jack Dorsey

Block cofounder Jack Dorsey outlines how AI can replace hierarchical coordination to speed companies up. "For the first time, a system can maintain a continuously updated model of an entire business and use it to coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Hallucination Stations: On Some Basic Limitations of Transformer-Based Language Models

Varin Sikka, Vishal Sikka

Stanford University’s Varin Sikka and VianAI Systems’ Vishal Sikka analyze LLM limits through computational complexity. "Our argument, in essence, is: if the prompt to an LLM specifies a computation (or a computational task) whose complexity is higher than that of the LLM's core operation, then the LLM will in general respond incorrectly."

Hand-picked book of the week

David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, reframes the classic underdog tale and shows how perceived weaknesses can become decisive strengths. Blending the biblical duel with modern case studies, from youth basketball to guerrilla warfare, David and Goliath challenges our assumptions about power and advantage.

"We think of underdog victories as improbable events: that’s why the story of David and Goliath has resonated so strongly all these years. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath?"

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $1.99 through the end of April.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

No Sidebar

No Sidebar, started by Brian Gardner and managed by Becoming Minimalist's Joshua Becker, is a collaborative blog that distills simple and minimalist living into practical essays. From The Case for Doing Nothing: "Rest is not the opposite of progress. It’s part of progress. It’s how your brain resets, your body repairs, and your creativity flows. The most productive thing you can do right now might be absolutely nothing at all."

Wisereads Vol. 136 — The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson, Armin Ronacher on the importance of time, and more

Last week, we shared A Room with a View by E. M. Forster. This week, we’re sharing an extended preview of Eric Jorgenson's new release, The Book of Elon.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Some Things Just Take Time

Armin Ronacher · pocoo.org

Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask and Jinja and longtime open-source maintainer, argues for patient, durable software building over pure speed. "Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend sprint."

Product management on the AI exponential

Cat Wu · claude.com

Anthropic's Cat Wu, Head of Product for Claude Code, outlines a faster product cadence for AI-native teams. "The constraints you designed around might disappear mid-project. You're building on ground that's rising underneath you, and teams need to reorganize around that reality. The new product management rhythm is rapid experimentation, consistent shipping, and doubling down on what works."

The Displacement of Cognitive Labor and What Comes After

Sahaj Garg · Sahaj Garg

Wispr co-founder Sahaj Garg clays out how accelerating AI capabilities could rapidly automate knowledge work and upend social structures, forcing new thinking about scarcity, status, and the transition ahead. "What’s clear is that the frameworks we have today were not designed for a world where scarcity applies to far fewer things than before, and in different ways. The implications of this shift will be one of the most complex questions of the coming decades."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

I'm 42. If you're in your 30s, watch this.

Mark Manson

Mark Manson, bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, distills 42 hard-won life lessons worth rereading: "Opinions have a way of imprisoning you and enforcing a view on the world. Try having fewer of them" and "The cost of inaction is often higher than the cost of the wrong action. Always be in motion" and "The best moments of your life will not look like the best moments of your life while they're happening."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Malleable Software That Never Was

Karri Saarinen

Karri Saarinen, Linear cofounder and CEO, that AI agents render customizable “malleable software” unnecessary, favoring opinionated systems that adapt to user intent at runtime. "Software and agents should carry more of the burden. Users should get better outcomes without having to become architects of their own tools."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Thinking—Fast, Slow, And Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning And The Rise Of Cognitive Surrender

Steven D. Shaw, Gideon Nave

Across three preregistered experiments, Wharton School researchers Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave show how people can over-rely on AI cognition, a vulnerability they call cognitive surrender. "We do not merely use AI; we think with it. In doing so, we must ask new questions: What happens when our judgments are shaped by minds not our own?"

Hand-picked book of the week

The Book of Elon

Eric Jorgenson

Eric Jorgenson, whose Almanack of Naval Ravikant is among the most highlighted books in Readwise, returns to distill two decades of Elon Musk's transcripts, tweets, and interviews into a single guide to purpose and success told entirely in Musk's own words. With a foreword by Naval Ravikant (who calls it "the only book an entrepreneur needs”), The Book of Elon offers a masterclass in first-principles thinking, radical execution, and building things that matter.

"Try to be useful. Do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world. It's hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume. Can you have a positive net contribution to society? Aim for that."

We're delighted that Eric is sharing an extended preview of The Book of Elon with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the preview, you can pick up the full book here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Cosmos Institute

Cosmos Institute's blog publishes weekly essays at the intersection of AI and philosophy, exploring autonomy, truth-seeking, and what it means to build technology that serves human flourishing. From Science needs scientists: "I still believe that AI will be fantastically useful, but not necessarily in the way we think. Discovery, after all, is not the same as understanding. As scientists, we need to engage with the process of inquiry to truly make sense of what we learn about the world. Only then can we understand."

Wisereads Vol. 135 — Sharif Shameem on how embarrassment kills good ideas, what legalized sports betting really costs, and more

Last week, we shared On the Art of Reading by Arthur Quiller-Couch. This week, we’re sharing A Room with a View by E. M. Forster.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Sucker

McKay Coppins · The Atlantic

Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins documents how a modest assignment to try sports betting spiraled into late-night wagers, family ripple effects, and a broader reckoning with the industry’s grip on American sports. "As a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that, unlike every civilization that came before us, we can beat the house."

Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work

Sharif Shameem · sharif.io

AI entrepreneur Sharif Shameem, founder of Lexica and Debuild, explains how creative progress requires tolerating embarrassment and why shipping bad ideas is the path to good ones. "It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce."

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Avery Pennarun · apenwarr.ca

Avery Pennarun, Tailscale cofounder and veteran systems engineer, argues that AI’s speed reveals how overgrown review pipelines throttle real progress and makes the case for engineering quality into the system itself. "The job of a code reviewer isn't to review code. It's to figure out how to obsolete their code review comment, that whole class of comment, in all future cases, until you don't need their reviews at all anymore."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

how to take notes like the top 1% of students

Gohar Khan

Popular study YouTuber Gohar Khan shares five fixes to transform how you take notes. His guiding analogy: "Learning is like pottery; you focus on the overall shape and structure first, and then once you have that in place, you can go in and focus on the minor details and patterns to bring your masterpiece to life. Knowledge works similarly."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Productive Individuals Don't Make Productive Firms

George Sivulka

Hebbia CEO George Sivulka argues that 10x individual gains won’t translate to firm performance without “Institutional AI” built around seven pillars that drive coordinated, revenue-generating outcomes. "In 2026, AI is driving a 10x increase in the productivity of the individuals who know how to leverage it. But that’s not enough. We’ve swapped the motor; we have not yet redesigned the factory."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence

Judah Goldfeder; Philippe Wyder; Yann LeCun; Ravid Shwartz Ziv

From Meta’s chief scientist Yann LeCun and collaborators, this paper challenges human-like “generality” as a goal for AI progress and proposes a more practical guiding concept. "It is highly unlikely that an AI tasked to fold both proteins and laundry will exceed a protein-folding specialist at protein folding or a laundry-folding specialist at laundry folding. Given limited resources, capability should be allocated to the tasks that carry utility rather than to an anthropocentric notion of universal competence."

Hand-picked book of the week

A Room With A View

E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster’s Edwardian classic follows Lucy Honeychurch from sunlit Florence to stifling Surrey, weighing passion against propriety and the costs of conformity. A witty, subversive social novel that asks whether we can choose our own lives when everyone is watching.

“There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light . . . We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm—yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

This edition of A Room with a View is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Sebastian's Substack

Argentine economist Sebastian Galiani writes clear, data-driven essays on markets, culture, policy, and how it all relates to the human experience. From The Economics of Rock: "Art does not cease to be art because it is shaped by contracts, pricing, platforms, or technology. If anything, those forces make visible how contingent and fragile artistic life really is. The beauty remains real. So does the system surrounding it."

Wisereads Vol. 134 — Tim Ferriss on the trap of self-help, Paul Graham's exploration of brand versus quality, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal. This week, we’re sharing On the Art of Reading by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’

Steve Rose · the Guardian

Guardian writer Steve Rose profiles Stewart Brand, counterculture icon and Whole Earth Catalog founder, who reflects on a lifetime of future-making, from psychedelics and personal computing to Bezos, Musk, and a 10,000-year clock. "One of the key schisms of the counterculture was a tension between the technologists and the environmentalists. ... Brand straddled both camps. He saw how they could complement each other."

The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me

Tim Ferriss · Tim Ferriss's Blog

After two decades as a leading self-improvement figure, Tim Ferriss reconsiders the pursuit of optimization and warns how it can backfire. "The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease."

The Brand Age

Paul Graham · paulgraham.com

Paul Graham, Y Combinator cofounder and technology essayist, traces how Swiss watchmaking shifted from engineering feats to conspicuous branding and what that shift reveals about luxury markets today. "Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. ... It's very much a story of our times."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The most successful AI company you’ve never heard of | Qasar Younis

Lenny's Podcast

On Lenny's Podcast, former YC COO and current Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis makes the case that the real AI revolution is happening in the physical world, from cars to construction, and shares why autonomy at scale is nearer than people think. "I think the next thing that happens in five to seven years is then full autonomy becomes the thing that everyone expects."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Services: The New Software

Julien Bek

Sequoia Capital investor Julien Bek explains how AI autopilots capture services spend by selling outcomes, not tools. "A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. The next legendary company will just close the books."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Labor Market Impacts Of AI: A New Measure And Early Evidence

Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory

Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory quantify AI job exposure using real usage and BLS data. "The rapid diffusion of AI is generating a wave of research measuring and forecasting its impacts on labor markets. But the track record of past  pproaches gives reason for humility. For example, a prominent attempt to measure job offshorability identified roughly a quarter of US jobs as vulnerable, but a decade on, most of those jobs maintained healthy employment growth."

Hand-picked book of the week

On the Art of Reading

Arthur Quiller-Couch

In this collection of his lectures from 1916 to 1918, legendary Cambridge professor Arthur Quiller-Couch makes a spirited case for reading as a humane art, arguing that masterpieces shape taste and nourish the soul beyond mere information. Drawing on Browning to Shelley to the cadences of the Bible, he urges teachers and readers to treat literature as living experience, not examinable trivia.

"Masterpieces, then, will serve us as prophylactics of taste, even from childhood; and will help us, further, to interpret the common mind of civilisation. But they have a third and yet nobler use. They teach us to lift our own souls."

This edition of On the Art of Reading is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

The Culturist

The Culturist editors explore art, math, and literature, drawing on classical education. From Why do we study math?: "Wherever math and symmetry are taken seriously in the visual arts, the result is something of otherworldly beauty, and it fills us with the same sense of calm that classical music does."

Wisereads Vol. 133 — Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal, Viv Groskop on the value of talking to strangers, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. This week, we’re sharing an exclusive preview of Nir Eyal's newest book, Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results. Plus, don't miss your chance to enter the giveaway for a free copy!

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should

Viv Groskop · the Guardian

Author Viv Groskop, host of How to Own the Room, argues that our shrinking willingness to chat with strangers is eroding social connection and shows, with research and practical cues, how low-stakes small talk can rebuild it. "We live in a world of intense and often unnecessary division. Small talk is a tiny, free and very possibly priceless reminder of our shared humanity."

The Mind-Numbing, Soul-Crushing Boredom of Parenthood

Daniel Smith · The Atlantic

Author Daniel Smith, whose forthcoming Hard Feelings examines difficult emotions, captures parenthood's tedium ripening into meaning. "The effort to stifle a hard emotion almost always fails, and causes it to fester and breed. The only true way to endure boredom—like anger, despair, shame—is to move toward it. To listen to it. To try to understand it."

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

Matheus Lima · Terrible Software

Software engineer Matheus Lima analyzes how hiring, reviews, and promotion systems bias engineers toward overbuilding and discusses how to counter it. "Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it. And the incentive problem doesn’t start at promotion time. It starts before you even get the job."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

This is Going to be Very Messy

Hank Green

Science communicator and veteran YouTuber Hank Green surveys concrete AI risks today and pushes back on industry hype about speculative futures, then confronts his own biases in a candid chat with Cal Newport. "We should be looking at the problems as they currently exist. And what I want to say to some people who might want to be effective altruists: what if dealing with the problems that we have right now is the thing that makes the future better? Like, what if guessing at the what the future needs actually makes the future worse and dealing with the problems we have right now is what makes the future better."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Claude-Native Law Firm

Zack Shapiro

Startup and venture lawyer Zack Shapiro outlines how his Claude-powered system encodes his personal judgment into custom skills to transform reviews, drafting, research, and client comms while keeping attorney oversight and ethics front and center. "The gap between how most lawyers use AI (typing a question into a chatbot and hoping for the best) and what I’ve described here is enormous. Closing that gap doesn’t require technical skill. It requires investing a few hours in learning how the tool actually works."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

AI Hurtles Ahead

Howard Marks

Howard Marks, cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management and veteran investor, assesses AI's breakneck progress and what it means for investors, productivity, and jobs. "Nothing has ever taken hold at the pace AI has. It's able to change the world at a speed that approaches instantaneous, outpacing the ability of most observers to anticipate or even comprehend."

Hand-picked book of the week

Beyond Belief

Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal, author of the international bestsellers Hooked and Indistractable, returns with Beyond Belief, a science-backed exploration of how the beliefs we choose shape the results we get. Rather than chasing the perfect strategy or plan, Eyal argues that belief is the real foundation of sustained motivation, and shows how it can be strengthened to unlock your potential.

"Beliefs aren't wishes or manifestations; they are mental models built through experience, evidence, and deliberate construction. Just as you wouldn't expect to develop physical strength without training, you can't develop powerful beliefs without strategic and consistent effort."

Nir's work has a special place in Readwise's origin story. Cofounder Dan read Hooked back when Readwise was just a seed of an idea, and Nir's thinking on the intersection of psychology and technology helped shape what it grew into. Dan's been revisiting those highlights through Readwise ever since.

We're thrilled that Nir is now sharing the first chapter of Beyond Belief with Wisereads readers ahead of its March 10 release. His team will also be giving away copies of the book, so enter the giveaway here. And, if you enjoy the preview, you can pre-order a full copy here and unlock time-limited exclusive bonuses!

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

The Wake Up Call

Scott Barker, startup operator and podcaster, writes The Wake Up Call on reinvention, modern ambition, and the search for life's deeper meanings. From The Three Games of Life: "The great game of life is often described as a single journey, but for me, it has been helpful to understand it more as three successive games. We are meant to figure out these three games before we die. All of which are here to help us grow, evolve and get closer to accepting our own death."

Wisereads Vol. 132 — Sam Kriss on tech’s agentic generation, Citrini's speculative warning from 2028, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Jamie Metzl's Superconvergence. This week, we’re sharing The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Child’s Play

Sam Kriss · Harper's Magazine

Essayist and critic Sam Kriss shadows hyper-agentic Zoomer founders and an online folk hero to investigate the cult of "agency" and what AI-age hustle culture is doing to ambition and humanity. "Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re 'mimetic' or 'agentic.' You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men."

The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis

CitriniResearch & Alap Shah · citriniresearch.com

In this speculative financial history, macro researchers CitriniResearch and Alap Shah of LOTUS imagine an AI-fueled productivity boom curdling into a self-reinforcing demand shock and systemic crisis by 2028. Despite its fictional nature, the scenario proved unsettlingly persuasive, enough to cause a sudden drop in the real markets as investors fled the exact stocks mentioned in the memo. "AI got better and cheaper. Companies laid off workers, then used the savings to buy more AI capability, which let them lay off more workers."

Stop Thinking of AI as a Coworker. It's an Exoskeleton.

Ben Gregory · Kasava

Ben Gregory, founder of AI-powered workflow platform Kasava, argues that using AI to amplify human effort gets better results than chasing fully autonomous agents. "The enduring value won't come from autonomous systems that work independently of humans. It will come from AI tools that are so well-integrated into human workflows that they feel like natural extensions of human capability."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

30 Years of Business Advice in 13 Minutes (from a Billionaire)

Chamath Palihapitiya

Billionaire investor and Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya distills decades of company-building and investing into hard-won principles on process, humility, optionality, and avoiding traps like debt and status. "If you're going to live a life without objectives and you're actually going to live a life of process, you have to create some really good boundary conditions."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The File System Is the New Database: How I Built a Personal OS for AI Agents

Muratcan Koylan

Muratcan Koylan, context engineer at Sully.ai, shows how a file-first Personal OS makes agents more useful and offers guidance on building one that works for you. "The specific modules, the file schemas, the skill definitions will look different for your work. But the patterns transfer. The principles for structuring information for AI agents are universal. Take what fits, ignore what doesn't, and ship something that makes your AI actually useful instead of generically helpful."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Evaluating AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?

Thibaud Gloaguen; Niels Mündler; Mark Müller; Veselin Raychev; Martin Vechev

ETH Zurich and LogicStar.ai researchers rigorously test AGENTS.md-style repository guides for coding agents, finding that the files might actually reduce the output quality. "Across multiple coding agents and LLMs, we find that context files tend to reduce task success rates compared to providing no repository context, while also increasing inference cost by over 20%."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Story of Doctor Dolittle

Hugh Lofting

In this first installment of his reknowned Doctor Dolittle series, Hugh Lofting introduces a kindly physician who learns to speak to animals and sails into a world of mischief and globe-trotting rescue missions. A whimsical adventure with a big heart, Lofting's beloved classic champions curiosity, compassion, and the belief that listening can change the world.

"But animals don’t always speak with their mouths," said the parrot in a high voice, raising her eyebrows. "They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails—with everything. Sometimes they don’t want to make a noise."

This edition of The Story of Doctor Dolittle is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Scale-Smart

Dennis Nehrenheim M.Sc., author of Scale-Smart, writes practical systems guides on protocols, workflows, and compounding productivity. From Progressive Efforts: "There’s something deeper happening when you work on the same thing for one hour every morning: the slow burn. Over time, your brain starts to process your effort between sessions. Ideas keep simmering in the background. Creative problems begin to solve themselves as your subconscious works through them, all because you kept the relationship with the effort alive."

Wisereads Vol. 131 — Superconvergence by Jamie Metzl, Ali Abdaal on how to learn AI in 19 minutes, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Marc Randolph's That Will Never Work. This week, we’re sharing a preview of Superconvergence, Jamie Metzl's exploration of genetics and biotech in the era of AI.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

Margaret-Anne Storey · margaretstorey.com

Margaret-Anne Storey, a professor of computer science and an ICSE Technical Debt Conference keynote speaker, explains why understanding must stay ahead of speed. "Cognitive debt tends not to announce itself through failing builds or subtle bugs after deployment, but rather shows up through a silent loss of shared theory."

Why I’m not worried about AI job loss

David Oks · davidoks.blog

AI and political economy writer David Oks argues that job-loss panic misses the reality of our complex, human-centric world: "The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we'll need humans to deal with them."

Taste for Makers

Paul Graham · paulgraham.com

Programmer and YC cofounder Paul Graham recently re-shared one of his most popular essays, predicting that cultivating good taste is more important now than ever. "If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. ... Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

You’re Not Behind (Yet): How to Learn AI in 19 Minutes

Ali Abdaal

Doctor-turned-entrepreneur and productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal maps a three-month path to AI fluency for anyone who's feeling like they might have missed the boat. "Increasingly, business owners are genuinely making decisions about who to hire, who to fire, and who to promote based on their level of AI fluency."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Tool Shaped Objects

Will Manidis

Will Manidis, ScienceIO cofounder and healthcare AI builder, explores why some tools can feel productive while not actually creating tangible value. "You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work—the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion—but it doesn't produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It's function is to feel like a tool."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Future Of Software Engineering

Thoughtworks

Thoughtworks convened senior engineers to map how AI agents are reshaping software work, from a new supervisory middle loop to organizational bottlenecks and testing-first practices. "The retreat surfaced a consistent pattern: the practices, tools and organizational structures built for human-only software development are breaking in predictable ways under the weight of AI-assisted work. The replacements are forming, but they are not yet mature."

Hand-picked book of the week

Superconvergence

Jamie Metzl

Jamie Metzl, WHO genome-editing advisor and author of Hacking Darwin, charts how accelerating advances in genetics, biotech, and AI are reshaping everything from health to the planet as a whole. Blending big-picture history with near-future scenarios, Superconvergence shows how exponential innovation, fragile governance, and enduring human values intersect, and what it will actually take to steer those powers with wisdom, equity, and foresight.

"After nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species, among the billions which have ever lived, suddenly has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life. We are today in the earliest stages of a journey in which we will have the growing capacity, over the coming years, decades, centuries, and millennia, to redirect evolution and recast life in all its dimensions, with profound implications for the future of life on Earth and, very likely, beyond."

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $3.99 through the end of February.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Knowledge Lust

Sam Rinko writes Knowledge Lust on practical self-education, sharing tales of great autodidacts and lessons for effective self-study. From How to make yourself crave hard books (not just want to want to read them): "You don’t have to be a professional teacher or a writer to teach and write. You don’t have to make a living from your intellectual work to justify integrating occasional creative intellectual projects into your life. A project that forces you to read, think, and create is an enriching and fulfilling challenge that everyone should take part in."

Wisereads Vol. 130 — That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph, the fatigue of extended AI usage, and more

Before we get into this week's issue, we want to acknowledge how much of the content shared in this newsletter lately has been focused on AI. As a collection of our users' most highlighted documents, Wisereads is uniquely susceptible to the current zeitgeist. We understand if, like Siddhant Khare's perspective shared below, you may have some AI fatigue, but we hope you can still find value in our hand-picked ebook and RSS feed until the general mood shifts back to other topics.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled content!

Last week, we shared Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea. This week, we’re sharing a preview of That Could Never Work, Marc Randolph's retrospective on the creation and early days of Netflix.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Siddhant Khare · Siddhant Khare

AI agent infrastructure engineer and OpenFGA maintainer Siddhant Khare offers a blunt look at how faster output can erode focus and well-being, plus practical habits to make daily engineering with AI sustainable. "This is the paradox: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of coordination, review, and decision-making. And those costs fall entirely on the human."

My AI Adoption Journey

Mitchell Hashimoto · Mitchell Hashimoto

HashiCorp cofounder and Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto shares a measured approach to adopting AI agents. "In an ocean of overly dramatic, hyped takes, I hope this represents a more nuanced, measured approach to my views on AI and how they've changed over time."

The Anthropic Hive Mind

Steve Yegge · Medium

Amazon and Google veteran Steve Yegge argues Anthropic’s chaotic, ultra-transparent culture is pioneering how AI-era software will actually get built. "Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Why You Should Stop Watching YouTube (Yes, Even This Video)

HealthyGamerGG

Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia explains that so-called “productive” YouTube often keeps you busy without driving real change. "If you are going to improve something, that should be the dedicated goal that you spend. It's not on your second monitor. You are going to sit down and intentionally learn something for the sake of implementation."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Clearing Your Allostatic Load Makes Laziness Impossible

Rian Doris

Flow expert Rian Doris, who’s trained teams at Audi and the US Air Force, shares a practical blueprint for entrepreneurs to sustain peak performance by systematically clearing allostatic load through active recovery. "Left unmanaged, this load accumulates. It spills from one day into the next, compounding over time and continually squashing your ability to perform."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Springs Of Action

Seth Godin & Claude

Marketing thinker Seth Godin teams up with Claude to revive Jeremy Bentham’s 1817 “springs of action” treatise as a practical lens for leadership, persuasion, and clearer moral reasoning. "The person who learns to see the springs—who can look at any human action and identify the pleasures being sought and the pains being avoided—gains a kind of X-ray vision for human affairs. Not cynicism: clarity."

Hand-picked book of the week

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea

Marc Randolph

Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph recounts the scrappy, often chaotic early days of building the company, illustrating his partnership with Reed Hastings and a long trail of bad ideas to show what it actually takes to turn a half-baked notion into a $150 billion business. Part origin story and part startup field guide, That Will Never Work distills decades of hard-won lessons on testing ideas, finding product–market fit, and staying resilient when everyone thinks you’re crazy.

"This is a story about how we went from personalized shampoo to Netflix. But it’s also a story about the amazing life of an idea: from dream to concept to shared reality. And about how the things we learned on that journey—which took us from two guys throwing ideas around in a car, to a dozen people at computers in a former bank, to hundreds of employees watching our company’s letters scroll across a stock ticker—changed our lives."

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $2.99 through the end of February.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Unmapped Storylands

Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted novelist, explores storytelling, perception, and empathy. From What is it that I am not seeing?: "How can we encounter hundreds of universes within our limited corner of this one? The only way to do that is through reading books—and reading widely, voraciously, with a childlike curiosity and an intellectual restlessness that refuses to settle down, retreat into silos, or confine itself to a single tribe or a given comfort zone."

Wisereads Vol. 129 — Mike Swanson on the quiet decay of good software, why coding was never the hard part, and more

Last week, we shared a collection of Mary Shelley's Short Fiction. This week, we’re sharing Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Code is cheap. Show me the talk.

Kailash Nadh · nadh.in

Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha and longtime FOSS engineer, explains where real leverage now lives in software. "For the first time ever, good talk is exponentially more valuable than good code. The ramifications of this are significant and disruptive. This time, it is different."

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back

Rebecca Solnit · the Guardian

Author Rebecca Solnit, acclaimed essayist on technology and culture, explores what humanity has lost to techn and how to reclaim it. "Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect."

Backseat Software

Mike Swanson · Mike Swanson's Blog

Software veteran Mike Swanson, formerly at Microsoft, argues that software has shifted from user-controlled tool to attention-hijacking channel. "Instead, let’s make software that respects your attention, does its job well, and lets you get on with your life. That’s what good software used to feel like and what it could feel like again. Good software is a tool that you operate, not a channel that operates on you."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"

The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz, former Uber engineering manager, interviews Openclaw founder Peter Steinberger about how AI has changed his engineering workflows. "Surprisingly, actually using agentic coding makes you a better coder, because you have to think harder about your architecture so that it's easier to verify."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering

Ian Tracey

Ian Tracey, a Pinterest alum with over a decade working with engineering teams, reframes AI’s impact on developer demand: "Software is unusual. Unlike farming or manufacturing, there's no natural ceiling on demand. There's no field that's fully planted, no quota that's been met. The work expands to fill the available capacity and then expands further."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

How AI Impacts Skill Formation

Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin

Anthropic researchers Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin study how AI tools reshape developer learning in randomized trials. "Our main research questions are (1) whether AI improves productivity for a coding task requiring new concepts and skills, and (2) whether this use of AI reduces the level of understanding of these new concepts and skills."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Mirror of the Sea

Joseph Conrad

Before becoming a writer, Joseph Conrad spent many years as a merchant marine sailor. In this autobiographical memoir, he explores seafaring's machinery and mystery and his own relationship with being at sea.

"For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs and gossamer?"

This edition of The Mirror of the Sea is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

The Autodidacts

The Autodidacts, a blog by three brothers who are self-educated makers and researchers, explores craft, learning, and internet culture. From Earnestness: "Criticising is much easier than building, but building is more valuable. Earnestness is a builder’s attitude. And sometimes, even when paired with 'unrealistic' ideas and optimism, that attitude is just what’s needed to change the world."

Wisereads Vol. 128 — Dario Amodei on surviving AI’s adolescence, why designers shouldn't trust the process, and more

Last week, we shared Robert Louis Stevenson's Travel Essays. This week, we’re sharing a collection of short stories from Mary Shelley.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Adolescence of Technology

Dario Amodei · darioamodei.com

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei warns that, although AI has the potential to vastly improve human life, it also poses a number of serious risks to society as a whole. "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."

What is the question?

Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher · Springer Nature Link

Originally published in 2019, this paper resurfaced recently when Tim Ferriss recommended it in his newsletter. Professors Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, computational biologists, argue that discovery begins with the revelation of better questions. "The most interesting unknowns of science are unknown unknowns—gaps that we were not even aware of before chancing upon them."

Clawdbot Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like

Federico Viticci · macstories.net

MacStories editor-in-chief Federico Viticci, a longtime Apple automation expert, explains how Clawdbot (since rebranded twice: first to Moltbot and now to OpenClaw) is shifting the landscape of AI assistants. "More so than using the latest flavors of Claude or ChatGPT, using Clawdbot and the process of continuously shaping it for my needs and preferences has been the closest I’ve felt to a higher degree of digital intelligence in a while."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Why Designers Can No Longer Trust the Design Process

Hatch Conference

At Hatch Conference, Anthropic design lead and former Figma director Jenny Wen challenges the rigid, artifact-heavy design process. "The reality is that the user doesn't care about the process artifacts you made or whether you made the perfect user journey. They care about the end experience that they're feeling and seeing."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Lessons from Building AI Agents for Financial Services

Nicolas Bustamante

Fintool CEO and co-founder Nicolas Bustamante distills hard-won lessons from two years building finance-grade AI agents in production. "The biggest lesson isn’t about sandboxes or skills or streaming. It’s this: The model is not your product. The experience around the model is your product."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Who Is On The Other Side?

Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan

Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan of Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global explain how active investors can profit by knowing who is on the other side of their trades and why. "The question of who buys and sells stocks received little attention when the foundations of modern finance theory were established. ... The evidence now shows that who is doing the buying and selling matters."

Hand-picked book of the week

Short Fiction

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, author of the iconic and foundational Frankenstein, explores love, science, grief, and fate in these haunting short stories, many of which were originally published in periodicals and annuals in the 1820s and 30s. 

This collection also includes Mathilda, a novella written shortly after Frankenstein but not published until after Shelley's death due to its controversial themes.

"We know not what all this wide world means; its strange mixture of good and evil. But we have been placed here and bid live and hope. I know not what we are to hope; but there is some good beyond us that we must seek; and that is our earthly task."

This edition of Short Fiction is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Nir and Far

Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, writes Nir and Far on behavioral design, habits, and attention. From Unlock Your Potential With The Power Of Belief: "Your beliefs are your mental toolkit. Make sure you’re carrying the right tools for the life you want to build."

Wisereads Vol. 127 — Oliver Burkeman's secret to happiness, Cory Doctorow on how the AI bubble will burst, and more

Last week, we shared Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, a recent addition to Standard Ebooks' catalog. This week, we’re sharing a collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's travelogues, documenting the many journeys of his own life.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

Cory Doctorow · the Guardian

Science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow dissects AI’s bubble economics and labor fallout, discussing the role of creative workers and what will be left behind when this bubble pops. "AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

The Dilbert Afterlife

Scott Alexander · astralcodexten.com

Psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander, author of the blog Astral Codex Ten, examines the legacy of comic writer Scott Adams and the mythos of the nerd psyche. "We’re all inmates in prisons of different names. Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. Adams couldn’t stop rattling the bars."

The secret to being happy in 2026? It’s far, far simpler than you think …

Oliver Burkeman · the Guardian

Oliver Burkeman, Guardian columnist and author of Four Thousand Weeks, makes the case for doing what enlivens you instead of pursuing growth through self-denial. "Life offers no prizes for being so good at deferring gratification that you accumulate a thousand uneaten marshmallows, then drop dead. At some point, you're going to have to eat a marshmallow."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The World's Most Important Machine

Veritasium

Veritasium's Casper Mebius breaks down the physics behind ASML's incredible breakthrough in computer chip manufacturing and tours the machine that kept Moore's Law alive. "For 30 years, almost everyone thought that actually building this machine was impossible, and yet it exists."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The future of enterprise software

Aaron Levie

Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie explains how AI agents amplify, rather than replace, core enterprise systems, arguing that "in a world of 100X more AI agents than people in an enterprise, the value of the systems of record and tools agents will use will go up, not down."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

How AI Destroys Institutions

Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey

Boston University law professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey warn that AI imperils core civic institutions. "Institutions are society's machinery for coordinating complex, enduring,  adaptable, and beneficial human activity with specific purposes. ... Unfortunately, the design and function of AI systems undermine most—if not  all—of these institutional dynamics."

Hand-picked book of the week

Travel Essays

Robert Louis Stevenson

Before he whisked readers away to Treasure Island or explored the psyches of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's first stories charted the course of his own travels: in a canoe, on foot, and in crowded emigrant ships.

This collection gathers his pioneering travelogues, from the lazy canals of Belgium and France in An Inland Voyage to the rugged Cévennes with a stubborn donkey, and onward across the Atlantic and over the American plains to California. Along the way he sketches innkeepers and gypsies, sailors and emigrants, old-world capitals and new Pacific towns, capturing a Europe on the cusp of modernity and a young America in motion, and always returning to the joys, hardships, and transformative magic of travel.

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this featherbed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for."

This edition of Stevenson's Travel Essays is available through Standard Ebooks. Explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Life Letters

Longtime photographer and writer Nadia Meli shares lyrical essays on creativity, identity, and anti-hustle living. From Your life is not a ladder: "Life is horizontal, unfolding, sprawling, vast. We don’t build life like a skyscraper. We cultivate life like a garden. Life is a space to plant. To tend. To root. To scatter seeds of experience, relationships, creativity, discovery, rest, play, effort."

Wisereads Vol. 126 — Jacob Rintamaki on the future of robotics, Dan Koe's guide to resolutions, and more

Last week, we shared William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a recent addition to Standard Ebooks' catalog. This week, we’re sharing another new addition released into the U.S.'s public domain this year: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez · antirez.com

Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, known online as antirez, cautions AI skeptics against missing the wave that's carrying programming into a new era. "LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. The same thing open source software did in the 90s."

Demystifying evals for AI agents

Anthropic · anthropic.com

Anthropic engineers Mikaela Grace, Jeremy Hadfield, Rodrigo Olivares, and Jiri De Jonghe share field-tested guidance on evaluating AI agents. "Like the Swiss Cheese Model from safety engineering, no single evaluation layer catches every issue. With multiple methods combined, failures that slip through one layer are caught by another."

35 Simple Health Tips Experts Swear By

Amanda Schupak · New York Times

New York Times Well reporter Amanda Schupak curates 35 research-backed, doable habits from leading health experts that address mental health, physical health, and beyond, with tips like: "If something feels too hard to do, it just means that the first step isn’t small enough," and "Dark-chocolate-covered nuts (at least 70 percent cocoa) are almost a perfect food."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Moving away from Agile: What's Next

AI Engineer

In an AI Engineer session, McKinsey SoftwareX leaders Martin Harrysson and Natasha Maniar discuss taking your team beyond agile frameworks to become more AI-native. "Engineers are moving away from execution and simply writing code to being more of orchestrators, thinking about how to divide up work to agents. And yet about 70% of the companies we survey have not changed their roles at all."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

How to fix your entire life in 1 day

Dan Koe

Dan Koe, an entrepeneur and writer on identity and behavior change, lays out a one-day reset to help you finally conquer the high failure rate of yearly resolutions. "If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Final Offshoring

Jacob Rintamaki

Stanford-trained technologist Jacob Rintamaki distills how robots and AI can compound each other's progress, and speculates on how together they might shape humanity's future. "The flywheel is elegant: Robots will build AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure will train better models. Better models will make robots smarter. Smarter robots will then build more AI infrastructure, as each turn of the wheel accelerates the next, faster and faster."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

To celebrate its release into the U.S. public domain, we're sharing American writer Dashiell Hammett's masterpiece detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, a foundational work of the hardboiled genre that inspired multiple film adaptations. The novel follows private detective Sam Spade as he navigates a treacherous world of criminals and deceit, searching for a legendary black statuette while entangled with the mysterious Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a woman whose loyalties remain as elusive as the artifact she seeks.

"I’m sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well, by Gad!—if you lose a son it’s possible to get another—and there’s only one Maltese falcon."

This edition of The Maltese Falcon is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Outsider Insight

Artist, filmmaker, and Sequoia Design Partner James Buckhouse chases his curiosity in Outsider Insight, exploring creativity and human ingenuity through a blog that's part adventure story, part meditative philosophy, and part tech exploration. From Inspiration in the Valley of Dreams: "Spend any amount of time with me and I’ll find a way to talk about story, art, and design. And how together they can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, if you get it just right and do it with all your heart."

Wisereads Vol. 125 — The lessons Addy Osmani learned at Google, Boris Cherny on Claude Code, and more

Last week, we shared How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, a short guide from 1910 on making the most of your time. This week, in honor of Public Domain Day, we’re sharing a new addition to Standard Ebooks’ catalog: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

2025: The year in LLMs

Simon Willison · simonwillison.net

Looking back on 2025, developer and Django co-creator Simon Willison recaps the major LLM shifts of the year, from reasoning: "It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools. Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks" to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, slop: "The internet has always been flooded with low quality content. The challenge, as ever, is to find and amplify the good stuff... Curation matters more than ever."

2025 letter

Dan Wang · Dan Wang

Dan Wang, bestselling author of Breakneck and longtime China tech analyst, reflects on the parallels between China and the Bay Area in his latest annual letter. "I am not a skeptic of AI. I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place."

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

Addy Osmani · addyosmani.com

After 14 years at Google, developer Addy Osmani shares hard-won advice for programmers looking to grow beyond just writing code, including: "Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage," and "You can win every technical argument and lose the project."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale

Lenny's Podcast

Learn to "give away your Legos" (and other career hacks for scaling teams) from Molly Graham on Lenny’s latest podcast. "I've watched a lot of people over many years struggle with feeling like they should hang on to the thing that they’ve been good at... if you actually just stay and build houses, eventually you're literally buried under a pile of Legos."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I'm Boris and I created Claude Code

Boris Cherny

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny reveals tips for getting more out of the tool: "A final tip: probably the most important thing to get great results out of Claude Code -- give Claude a way to verify its work. If Claude has that feedback loop, it will 2-3x the quality of the final result."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Recursive Language Models

Alex L. Zhang, Tim Kraska, and Omar Khattab

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory introduce Recursive Language Models: a new method that helps LLMs handle longer prompts more accurately, and often more cheaply. "The key insight is that long prompts should not be fed into the neural network (e.g., Transformer) directly but should instead be treated as part of the environment that the LLM can symbolically interact with."

Hand-picked book of the week

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

In celebration of Public Domain Day, when new works enter the U.S. public domain each new year, we’re sharing Nobel laureate William Faulkner’s fifth novel, As I Lay Dying. A staple on both The Guardian and the Modern Library lists of the 100 best novels, this short novel follows a dysfunctional Mississippi family as they contemplate death, infidelity, and religion on their pilgrimage to bury Addie Bundren’s casket in her hometown.

"Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t."

This edition of As I Lay Dying is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their ever-expanding collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Niklas Göke

Daily essayist and Four Minute Books founder, Niklas Göke, explores writing craft and self-improvement on his blog. From The Suck Is Why We’re Here: "I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. It’s a daily practice for my brain. AI can generate output, but it can’t give me any of these benefits."

Wisereads Vol. 124 — Angela Duckworth on willpower and temptation, The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Inner Excellence, Jim Murphy’s viral handbook on mastering the mind for peak performance. This week, we're sharing How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, a short guide from 1910 on making the most of your time.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Publishing your work increases your luck

Aaron Francis · GitHub

Do things, and tell people. That’s the strategy Aaron Francis, marketing engineer at Tuple, uses to increase his luck. "The formula may be simple, but I’ll admit it’s not always easy. It’s scary to put yourself out there. It’s hard to open yourself up to criticism. People online can be mean. But for every snarky comment, there are ten times as many people quietly following along and admiring not only your work, but your bravery to put it out publicly. And at some point, one of those people quietly following along will reach out with a life-changing opportunity and you’ll think, 'Wow, that was lucky.'"

Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.

Angela Duckworth · The New York Times

Drawing on imagery from a Frog and Toad children’s book, psychologist and Grit author Angela Duckworth explains how to resist temptation. "You cannot change the conditions of modern life, but you are the sovereign ruler of what enters your personal space. Physical distance creates psychological distance: Draw close what you want more of, push away what you want less."

Shipping at Inference-Speed

Peter Steinberger · steipete’s blog

Developer Peter Steinberger has a confession: he ships code he hasn’t read. Using GPT-5.2 Codex, he juggles 3–4 projects at a time. "The amount of software I can create is now mostly limited by inference time and hard thinking. And let’s be honest - most software does not require hard thinking."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Fix Your Attention Span (Before It's Too Late)

Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink, bestselling author on work and behavior, shares a five step plan to rebuild attention: "Think of your brain like a toddler; it melts down if you don't give it snacks and naps. Ignoring that fact won't make you heroic. It'll just make you cranky and unproductive."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity

sysls

Internet writer "Sysls," an entrepreneur and portfolio manager, argues the old wealth bargain is broken, pushing young workers toward riskier bets like crypto and sports betting. "The traditional path to wealth accumulation is closed. Not difficult. Closed. When boomers hold ~50% of national wealth while comprising 20% of the population, and millennials hold ~10% despite being the same share, the game reveals itself to be fundamentally broken."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

5 Cheat Codes To Winning At Life

Mark Manson

In his newly published short ebook, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck author Mark Manson shares five hacks for winning at the game of life. Among them: "Get Good at Feeling Bad: Life is a never-ending stream of challenges that must be confronted and surmounted," and "Don’t Die Alone. The people you allow into your life are one of the most important determinants of how you play this often lonely game."

Hand-picked book of the week

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

Arnold Bennett

With a fresh new year ahead, it’s the perfect moment to rethink how we spend our days. Enter English essayist Arnold Bennett’s century-old masterclass: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

"It has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has."

First published in 1910 and praised by Ali Abdaal and Farnam Street, this classic delivers enduring wisdom on time management. This edition is available via Global Grey, where Julie, a solo curator, meticulously formatted over 2,500 public domain ebooks.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Kent Hendricks

Marketing director Kent Hendricks positioned himself as one to watch with the launch of his new Substack. From his debut post, 52 things I learned in 2025: "Toast actually does usually land butter-side down. For toast to land butter-side up, average table height would need to be about 9.8 feet."

Wisereads Vol. 123 — Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy, How Warren Buffett Did It, and more

Last week, we shared the autobiography of self-help pioneer Benjamin Franklin. This week, we’re featuring a preview of Inner Excellence, Jim Murphy’s viral guide to mastering the mind for peak performance.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

2025 LLM Year in Review

Andrej Karpathy · karpathy

Andrej Karpathy, AI researcher and this newsletter’s most-highlighted author of the year, recounts the paradigm shifts that defined LLM progress in 2025, from reasoning: "The LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like 'reasoning' to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations," to agents: "It's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that 'lives' on your computer."

Training the Idea Muscle

Aadil Pickle · Alexandria

In a profile of the Bay Area’s biggest internet prankster, Riley Walz, writer Aadil Pickle recounts his most memorable hijinks and explores what makes Riley an unstoppable idea machine. "Find My Parking Cops: Find My Friends but it tracks San Francisco parking cops and all the tickets they give out" and the "Fast Food Index: Showing price disparities of fast food across the country to determine an area's cost of living."

How Warren Buffett Did It

Seth A. Klarman · The Atlantic

Legendary value investor Seth A. Klarman, Baupost CEO and author of Margin of Safety, reflects on Warren Buffett’s legacy as he steps back from Berkshire Hathaway. "No one else has ever built such an investment fortune from scratch; it was as if he hit a lottery with an ever-growing payoff, though one based not on luck but on the consistent application of skillful effort."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Learn So Fast It’s Almost Unfair

theMITmonk

Sandeep, a CEO turned advisor and investor who goes by "theMITmonk," shares a system for learning like the best. It begins with honoring your brain's limits: "If you dump a gallon of theory into a 4 oz bowl, how much do you think it will retain? Well, exactly 4 oz of it, right? And it's a trap that has an almost 100% failure rate. Today's AI can run millions of processes in parallel, but our human brain cannot do that. We're built for serial learning, serial processing, one transfer at a time."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds

Ivan Zhao

Likening AI to breakthroughs like the steam engine and steel, Notion cofounder Ivan Zhao predicts that a transformation of the knowledge economy is just around the corner. "Every miracle material required people to stop seeing the world via the rearview mirror and start imagining the new one. Carnegie looked at steel and saw city skylines. Lancashire mill owners looked at steam engines and saw factory floors free from rivers.We are still in the waterwheel phase of AI, bolting chatbots onto workflows designed for humans."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Distributional AGI Safety

Nenad Tomašev, Matija Franklin, Julian Jacobs, et al.

In their latest paper, researchers at Google DeepMind reframe AGI and its safety recommendations for a "patchwork" of agents. "AGI, in this view, is not an entity but a 'state of affairs': a mature, decentralized economy of agents where the primary human role is orchestration and verification, a system that discovers and serves real-world needs far more efficiently than any centralized model ever could."

Hand-picked book of the week

Inner Excellence

Jim Murphy

Former Cubs outfielder turned Olympic coach Jim Murphy shares his formula for peak performance in Inner Excellence, the book that sparked national curiosity when Philadelphia’s A.J. Brown was spotted reading it on the sidelines during an NFL game. Though Murphy’s work began with athletes, his approach to cultivating mental clarity resonates with high performers across every field.

"We don’t pursue peak performance for the trophy or adoration, but to discover something within us and experience something we’ve never experienced before. We compete for the competition itself, to fully experience the moment and feel fully alive. We do this to help others—including our opponents—do the same thing, so we can all learn and grow and raise the level of excellence in our lives. We crave adversity and challenges as a means of seeing the truth about who we are in that moment and therefore who we can become."

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full title wherever you get your ebooks. Starting Monday, Inner Excellence will be on sale for one week at $2.99 in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Useful Fictions

Ex-poker pro and lawyer Cate Hall writes Useful Fictions on agency and truth-seeking. From Rightness is a prison: "But once you get used to loosening your grip, the same beliefs can transform into lenses you can slip on and off, experimenting with how the world looks in each tint... What began as constraint becomes play, and that play is the beginning of real freedom."

Wisereads Vol. 122 — Derek Thompson's 26 ideas for 2026, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new Substack, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive full debut from practical philosopher, Andrew Taggart: Chop Wood, Carry Water. This week, we’re sharing the autobiography of the father of the self-help genre, Benjamin Franklin.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

Joan Westenberg · Joan Westenberg

Writer Joan Westenberg invites readers to embrace "thick" desires, the kind that transform you, over "thin" ones that leave you unchanged. In her case, it’s the act of making bread: "You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away."

The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026

Derek Thompson · derekthompson.org

Journalist Derek Thompson revisits his most successful essays of the year, gathering 26 insights he believes will shape the year ahead. From media and tech: "At this rate, the AI build-out will outspend the entire Apollo program, every year, despite being financed by the private sector," to entertainment and medicine: "The age of alcohol is over, and the future looks ominously like hundreds of millions of people getting high alone rather than getting tipsy together."

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

Martin Alderson · Martin Alderson

First, software ate the world. Now, agentic AI is eating software, argues engineer Martin Alderson. He weighs in on which SaaS companies still have a moat and which are at risk: "If your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Using Caffeine to Optimize Mental & Physical Performance | Huberman Lab Podcast 101

Andrew Huberman

Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explores caffeine’s role as a behavioral reinforcer that, when used intentionally, can support cognitive and physical performance, as well as mood. "Not surprisingly, the large-scale analyses of the relationship between depression and caffeine show that, provided people are not drinking so much caffeine that it makes them overly anxious, regular intake of caffeine is inversely related to levels of depression."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Design is search

Karri Saarinen

You’ve likely heard that constraints fuel creativity, but Linear cofounder Karri Saarinen sees it differently. In early design phases, he warns against rigid toolsets that stifle exploration: "Use whatever tools you want, but be deliberate about what mode you are in. Protect exploration from premature constraint. Invite constraints when you are ready to learn from them. Use code as feedback, not as a cage."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

Alan Kay

In his 2007 talk in Italy, Turing Award winner Alan Kay argued that the next major leap in computing would take place in education, particularly in the minds of young people. "The enlightenment of some has led to communities of outlook, knowledge, wealth, commerce, and energy that help the less enlightened behave better. It is not at all a coincidence that the first part of this real revolution in society was powered by the printing press. The next revolutions in thought – such as whole systems thinking and planning leading to major new changes in outlook – will be powered by the real computer revolution – and it could come just in time to win over catastrophe." 

Hand-picked book of the week

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

You probably know Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of bifocals, swim fins, and the lightning rod. We also have him to thank for the first circulating library and the first volunteer fire department. But few people realize this founding father also sired the self-help genre.

Franklin grew up poor, but thanks to hard work (what he calls "industry"), ingenuity, and a little bit of luck, he became one of the most influential figures in history. His autobiography tells the story of how this happened. Despite being written in the 1700s, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin remains remarkably relevant and readable to this day.

"Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas."

This edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their ever-expanding collection of carefully formatted, high quality, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Statistician and Antifragile author Nassim Nicholas Taleb launched a new Substack, where he’s sharing essays and lectures on probability, applications, and inferential rigor. From The World in Which We Live: "In biology and economics, entities grow in a convex way, then slow as they saturate — growth may be unbounded, but remains sub-logarithmic. Once you have a two-car garage, do you need a five-car garage? Some might, but most don’t — the incentive diminishes."

Wisereads Vol. 121 — Chop Wood, Carry Water by Andrew Taggart, The New Yorker on performative reading, and more

Last week, we shared a new addition to the Standard Ebooks catalogue, a selection of Isaac Asimov’s collected short science fiction stories. This week, we're sharing an exclusive full debut from practical philosopher, Andrew Taggart: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Curious Notoriety of "Performative Reading"

Brady Brickner-Wood · The New Yorker

When authenticity is a top value, reading Infinite Jest at the bar might raise eyebrows, but should it? The New Yorker considers: "Performative reading has emerged as a suspicious activity not because reading books is suspect but because being beheld reading a book is understood to be yet another way for one to market himself, to portray to the world that he is indeed deeper and more expansive than his craven need for attention—demonstrated by reading a difficult book in public—suggests."

Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?

Sam Kriss · New York Times

Beyond the em dash and the word "delve," there are hallmarks of AI writing that make essayist Sam Kriss cringe. "It knows that good writing involves subtlety: things that are said quietly or not at all, things that are halfway present and left for the reader to draw out themselves. So to reproduce the effect, it screams at the top of its voice about how absolutely everything in sight is shadowy, subtle and quiet. Good writing is complex. A tapestry is also complex, so A.I. tends to describe everything as a kind of highly elaborate textile."

Using LLMs at Oxide

Bryan Cantrill · oxide.computer

Oxide Computer Company cofounder Bryan Cantrill sets guidelines for using LLMs in the workplace, warning employees against using AI for writing. "LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Give Me 9 Minutes, I'll Make You AI-Native

Jeff Su

Move from "AI Literate" to "AI Native" by adopting a few habits from Jeff Su: keep a prompt library, leave breadcrumbs, and plan tasks. "The rule of thumb here is for any project that will take more than an hour, spend 5 to 10 minutes mapping the steps and tagging which ones are AI or manual. For the productivity nerds out there, this is a classic example of sharpening the axe, where spending a few minutes on planning up front saves hours of work later."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is back with a practical tip for prompting AI: "For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask: 'What do you think about xyz'? There is no 'you'. Next time try: 'What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?'"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Is It A Bubble?

Howard Marks

Drawing on writing from Derek Thompson, Ben Thompson, Byrne Hobart, Tobias Huber, and others, Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks examines the possibility of an AI bubble from an investing perspective. "'Mean-reversion bubbles' – in which markets soar on the basis of some new financial miracle and then collapse – destroy wealth. On the other hand, 'inflection bubbles' based on revolutionary developments accelerate technological progress and create the foundation for a more prosperous future, and they destroy wealth. The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress."

Hand-picked book of the week

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Andrew Taggart

You might already be familiar with Andrew’s practice without realizing it through another author we’ve featured: Paul Millerd of Good Work, who was set on the proverbial Pathless Path after considering Andrew’s question: "If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?" In Chop Wood, Carry Water, Andrew carries that inquiry forward with a practical aim: to help readers meet the inescapable, mundane tasks of daily life with careful attention, until the heaviness begins to dissolve and something steadier takes its place.

"On the contrary, what is felt by the one who truly grasps the essence of the yoga of work is a quiet beauty, an energy that’s unfolding through seamless activity. For such a one, there is not just ease but also love."

We’re honored Andrew is sharing a full copy of Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga of Work exclusively with Wisereads readers. If it resonates, you can show your support by purchasing a physical copy, checking out his newsletter, or exploring his teaching on his personal website.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Pathways To The Tao

This week's author, Andrew Taggart, is a "practical philosopher". He’s a gentle guide for anyone who's asking fundamental questions about what it means to lead a life well lived. From I’m Already Perfect—No and Yes: "Humility’s good buddy is honesty, which calls for a reckoning with one’s sticky tendencies as well as with the apparent paradoxes of any great teaching. One such paradox is, yes, that you are ultimately perfect—now go sweep the floor."

Wisereads Vol. 120 — Google's Complete Guide to Nano Banana Pro, Francesca Hogi on unlocking your flirting superpowers, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview from Joel J. Miller's The Idea Machine, his latest release tracing the history and impact of our favorite technology: the book. This week, we’re highlighting a new addition to the Standard Ebooks catalogue, a selection of Isaac Asimov’s collected short science fiction stories.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

Effective harnesses for long-running agents

Anthropic · anthropic.com

Justin Young of Anthropic explains how the Claude Agent SDK coordinates across limited context windows by dividing work between an initializer agent and coding agents. "Imagine a software project staffed by engineers working in shifts, where each new engineer arrives with no memory of what happened on the previous shift. Because context windows are limited, and because most complex projects cannot be completed within a single window, agents need a way to bridge the gap between coding sessions."

Writing a good CLAUDE.md

Kyle Mistele · humanlayer.dev

Your CLAUDE.md file is one of the highest-leverage configuration points of Claude Code, so developer Kyle Mistele recommends spending time to get it right. His tips include: "CLAUDE.md is for onboarding Claude into your codebase. It should define your project's WHY, WHAT, and HOW," and "Less (instructions) is more. While you shouldn't omit necessary instructions, you should include as few instructions as reasonably possible in the file."

Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize

Michael Clune · The Atlantic

Michael Clune, professor at Ohio State University, warns that the skills students skip by using AI to speed through coursework are the very ones they'll need most in an AI-powered world. "Only by patiently learning to master a discipline do we gain the confidence and capacity to tackle new fields. Classroom discussions, coupled with long hours of closely studying difficult material, will help students acquire that magic key to the world of AI: asking a good question."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How to Unlock Your Flirting Superpowers | Francesca Hogi | TED

TED

Curiosity, compliments, and playfulness are at the heart of love coach Francesca Hogi’s approach to flirting, which she reimagines as a form of everyday connection. "Your genuine smile can make someone's day... Lean into being the version of you who leaves other people with a smile on their face. And notice how much more magnetic you become."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Complete Guide to Nano Banana Pro: 10 Tips for Professional Asset Production

Google AI Studio

There’s a new image generation model on the scene that excels at rendering text, creating high-res images, and keeping characters consistent across frames. Learn how to get the most from your prompts with tips from the team at Google. "Nano-Banana Pro is a 'Thinking' model. It doesn't just match keywords; it understands intent, physics, and composition. To get the best results, stop using 'tag soups' (e.g., dog, park, 4k, realistic) and start acting like a Creative Director."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Path Of A Packet Through The Linux Kernel

Alexander Stephan, Lars Wüstrich

Researchers from the Technical University of Munich trace a packet through the Linux kernel in a detailed technical paper aimed at helping developers debug and optimize performance. "Nowadays, almost everything is networked, from a personal computer to a fridge. Although networking is essential for modern computing, few know the complexity of getting a packet to and from a wire."

Hand-picked book of the week

Short Science Fiction

Isaac Asimov

Before he penned I, Robot or Foundation, science fiction master Isaac Asimov got his start writing short stories. In this collection, newly added to the Standard Ebooks catalogue, readers can sample his signature style and dive into robots and the positronic brain, subjects Asimov returns to again and again.

"The planetary target was a huge one for an oxygen-water world. Though it lacked the size of the uninhabitable hydrogen-ammonia planets and its low density made its surface gravity fairly normal, its gravitational forces fell off but slowly with distance. In short, its gravitational potential was high and the ship’s Calculator was a run-of-the-mill model not designed to plot landing trajectories at that potential range. That meant the Pilot would have to use manual controls."

This edition of Asimov's Short Science Fiction is available through Standard Ebooks. Explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Mind Candy

On his Substack, Mind Candy, D.A. DiGerolamo shares his favorite quotes, reads, and reflection questions for practical philosophers in bite-sized form. From An Authentic True Choice: "Meaning isn’t found on the podium. It isn’t defined by the medal around our neck or the title after our name. Meaning is written in the choices we make, in the moments we realize we are the ones defining our lives."

Wisereads Vol. 119 — The Idea Machine by Joel J. Miller, Charli XCX on being a pop star, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt from Nesrine Changuel’s Product Delight, a groundbreaking guide to making products stand out through surprise and joy. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview from Joel J. Miller's The Idea Machine, his latest release tracing the history and impact of our favorite technology: the book.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

Part 1: My Life Is a Lie

Michael W. Green · Yes, I give a fig

An interesting companion to Kyla Scanlon’s piece from last week, investor and strategist Michael W. Green explores why the middle class feels poorer despite GDP growth. Drawing on Mollie Orshansky’s original poverty metric, he proposes a modern update: "If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality... the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200. It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000."

The realities of being a pop star.

Charli XCX · charli's substack

On her newly launched Substack, Brat artist Charli XCX writes candidly about the highs and lows of pop stardom and what she craves most from artists. "I want hedonism, danger and a sense of anti establishment to come along with my artists because when I was younger I wanted to escape through them. I don’t care if they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a persona or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds. To me that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY."

Agent Design Is Still Hard

Armin Ronacher · Lucumr.pocoo.org

Open-source developer Armin Ronacher gets into the details of building smarter agents. "Every time the agent runs a tool you have the opportunity to not just return data that the tool produces, but also to feed more information back into the loop. For instance, you can remind the agent about the overall objective and the status of individual tasks. You can also provide hints about how the tool call might succeed when a tool fails."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The Routine That's Keeping You Miserable

HealthyGamerGG

Learn to love the grind with Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, who explains why managing your energy consistently across the week makes peak performance sustainable. "The concept of the weekend, I think, is one of the worst inventions in the history of humanity — arguably the worst one. We created this idea of the weekend where you get to recover from what we do to you during the week. The moment we created the weekend, we gave people license to absolutely chew through us during the week."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Today I turn 55

Kevin Dahlstrom

In honor of his 55th birthday, Kevin Dahlstrom shares the habits he’s compounded over time to feel and perform his best, covering everything from fitness: "Walk 15+ miles a week, even if you do other exercise. Humans are uniquely made to move slowly over long distances—it’s critical to longevity," to mindset: "Have a mindset of abundance. There is no advantage to being a pessimist—even if you’re right, it’s a miserable way to live. In a very real way… whatever you believe, you’re right!"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Building An AI-Native Engineering Team

OpenAI

The team at OpenAI shares practical guidelines for speeding up the software development lifecycle with AI. "Teams that start with well-scoped tasks, invest in guardrails, and iteratively expand agent responsibility see meaningful gains in speed, consistency, and developer focus."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Idea Machine

Joel J. Miller

We’ve long been fascinated by the book as a form of technology, and former publishing VP Joel J. Miller shares that obsession. In The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, he explores the role of books in shaping civilization, using vivid storytelling, sharp insights, and compelling anecdotes.

"'Books are a uniquely portable magic,' novelist Stephen King once said. It’s an observation I take as confirmation of another, known as Clarke’s Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

We tend to equate books with mere information. In doing so, we miss that they are an information technology. And not just any information technology—no, in understanding how our world came to be, books emerge as an essential technology. Books are hardware as well as software, and it’s the combination that explains their peculiar power and effect."

We couldn't be more thrilled that Joel is sharing an exclusive two-chapter preview with Wisereads readers. If it resonates, you can order The Idea Machine here, fresh off the press.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Miller's Book Review

This week’s author, Joel J. Miller, reflects on his recent reads and reading culture at large in his Substack, Miller's Book Review. From The Quiet Collapse of Reading—and the Only Real Solution: "The problem? Parents say they love books more than they do. Kids mimic what they observe, not what we say. When parents say kids should read but spend their own time doomscrolling political news on X or playing with face filters, kids notice. Only a quarter of kids observed their parents reading books, according to one study; meanwhile, more than half noticed Mom and Dad glued to social media."

Wisereads Vol. 118 — Product Delight by Nesrine Changuel, Brian Armstrong on action, and more

Last week, we shared H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, a cornerstone of science fiction. This week, we're sharing a preview of Nesrine Changuel’s Product Delight, a groundbreaking guide to making products stand out through surprise and joy.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

Kyla Scanlon · Kyla's Newsletter

Economics writer and creator Kyla Scanlon took her book In This Economy? on the road and observed that while wealth still shows up on balance sheets and in stock portfolios, it is noticeably absent from many Americans’ daily lives. "America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."

Galaxy brain resistance

Vitalik Buterin · Vitalik.eth.limo

Appeals to inevitability and long-termism can be a dangerous way to win arguments, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin warns in his latest piece. "Inevitabilism in our society is most often deployed as a way for people to retroactively justify things that they have already decided to do for other reasons - which often involve chasing political power or dollars. Simply understanding this fact is often the best mitigation: the moment when people have the strongest incentive to make you give up opposing them is exactly the moment when you have the most leverage."

Are we doomed?

David Runciman · London Review of Books

Cambridge honorary professor of politics David Runciman reviews three recent books on depopulation, climate, and migration to uncover the forces keeping fertility rates low and the implications for aging societies. One bracing statistic: "Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Learn the basics of Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity

Google demonstrates its latest release, Antigravity, an IDE for the era of agents that combines an editor, agent manager, and browser in a single workflow. "Our app seems to be working. Now, let's put a bow on it. We want to be able to add this flight into our Google Calendar. Let's ask the agent to do this for us."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people

Brian Armstrong

In a refreshingly short tweet, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong cuts to the chase on how to unblock decisions and learn faster: "Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

How To Remember Everything You Read

Polymath Investor

In a brief, practical PDF, Polymath Investor compiles evidence-based techniques used by the best readers to remember more. "Highlight and underline very selectively – ideally no more than 10–20% of the text. Mark only the most important points or phrases that capture the essence. Why It Works: Over-highlighting is a form of mental laziness that can hinder memory (you end up bypassing the decision of what’s truly important)."

Hand-picked book of the week

Product Delight

Nesrine Changuel

Your browser’s password manager, the Chrome dino, Gmail’s Smart Compose, virtual backgrounds in video calls, auto-matched receipts: what do they all have in common? They create moments of delight for online users, when needs are not only met but exceeded with surprise and joy.

These are the moments product coach Nesrine Changuel helps teams create, now captured in her new book Product Delight. It’s a practical guide for companies looking to stand out by building emotional connection into their products.

"Solving user needs is fundamental, but true product delight comes from going beyond expectations. It’s about delivering value in ways users didn’t ask for but instantly appreciate. Delight happens when a product surprises with effortlessness, memorability, and the feeling that it’s genuinely looking out for them."

We’re thrilled Nesrine is sharing a preview of Product Delight with Wisereads readers. If it resonates, we invite you to support Nesrine by picking up a full copy here. 🎉

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Delightful Tips

This week’s featured author, Nesrine Changuel, draws from a decade of experience building beloved products at Skype, Spotify, and Chrome to help companies design for connection on her Substack, Delightful Tips. From When Hospitality Meets Product: "Functionality creates trust, but it doesn’t create love. Whether it’s the way a waiter remembers your name or how Google Photos quietly curates your best memories into a story, connection comes from the human layer around functionality."

Wisereads Vol. 117 — Mike Levin's advice for students, Brie Wolfson on Inside Cursor, and more

Last week, we shared an American classic perfect for fall: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. This week, we're sharing H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, a cornerstone of science fiction.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

What advice do I give to my students?

Mike Levin · Forms of life, forms of mind

Aimed at both high schoolers and PhD candidates, Biology professor Dr. Mike Levin shares guidance for navigating niche academic paths, including finding mentors and handling feedback: "If someone gives you a specific critique of your experiment, data, or writing – that’s gold. You don’t have to agree with them, and it doesn’t even have to be stated kindly or come from a place of support, for you to profit from it. Even hostile jerks have important things to teach you."

Inside Cursor

Brie Wolfson · Colossus - Business Podcasts

Brie Wolfson, CMO of Colossus, reports from inside Cursor, highlighting a culture of focus, calm, and drama-free execution. "When it comes to making something wonderful, the magic is in the mundane. Greatness is created through the collision of little sparks, ignited by people at the peak of the craft who care a lot and won’t stop working until it gets there."

Curate People

Naval Ravikant · Naval Podcast

AngelList cofounder and investor Naval Ravikant reveals his founder’s playbook for recruiting, culture, and product rigor. "The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement and veto, that’s a sad day. That’s the day that the company’s no longer being driven directly by you."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Don't Set a Goal For 2026 Until You Watch This

Bullet Journal

Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal Method, considers how the arrival fallacy and the rigidity of traditional goal-setting can block the path to a fulfilling life. "Traditional goals are like airports. If you don’t land the plane on the runway, it’s kind of a disaster. There’s this sense that you have to get it right before you even begin, which prevents many goals from ever taking off. Intentional goals are more like lighthouses. Sailors... use lighthouses to help them navigate unfamiliar territory."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Ok, here is my trip report from 4.67 grams of magic mushrooms, 24.9 mg of psilocybin

Bryan Johnson

Join Bryan Johnson on his magic mushroom trip as he unpacks his vision of a future without death. "While in this mushroom-induced dimension, it felt clear that we are about to start waking up from a slumber that has hypnotized us into accepting death. This will happen faster than people think. Once people see a practical path to extending a healthy life, they will adopt ferociously."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. News Release

Warren E. Buffett

In his Thanksgiving news release, Warren Buffett hands off the writing of Berkshire’s annual shareholder letter to Chairman Greg Abel and reflects on legacy and aging. "Father Time, to the contrary, now finds me more interesting as I age. And he is undefeated; for him, everyone ends up on his score card as 'wins.' When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Time Machine

H. G. Wells

Although The Time Machine wasn’t H. G. Wells’ first take on time travel, it was the novel that introduced readers to a device that lets its inventor leap across centuries. In just a hundred pages, a Victorian scientist journeys 800,000 years into the future and finds a world beyond human civilization.

"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence."

This edition of The Time Machine is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high-quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Works on My Machine

Engineer Scott Werner writes Works on My Machine, a hands-on newsletter on AI, developer tools, and product craft. From The Only Skill That Matters Now: "[Gretzky] didn't become great because he predicted the puck. He became great because he could actually get to ANY position on the ice and be open. The prediction was secondary to the skating. That's where we are now. Except our skates are prompts. Our ice is context windows. Our edges are knowing how to talk to Claude or Gemini or whatever comes out next that makes both of them obsolete."

Wisereads Vol. 116 — How Not to Waste Your Life by Maria Popova, The Scarlet Letter, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of Heather and Douglas Boneparth's new release, Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team. This week, we're sharing an American classic perfect for fall: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. 

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

102 Lessons from the 102 Books I Read This Year

Scott Young · Scott H. Young

Over the past year, Ultralearning author Scott Young read 102 books. Now, he's sharing a key insight from each, covering topics from reading and money to productivity and health: "Regular exercise cuts your risk of an early death by 40%, roughly the same benefit as quitting smoking," and "Donating money to the most effective charities, it takes roughly $3500-$5000 to save a person’s life."

How I Use Every Claude Code Feature

Shrivu Shankar · sshh.io

Shrivu Shankar's Abnormal AI team consumes billions of tokens each month. Along the way, he’s picked up some hard-won lessons on using Claude Code, including: "Treat your CLAUDE.md as a high-level, curated set of guardrails and pointers" and "Don’t Just Say 'Never.' Avoid negative-only constraints like 'Never use the --foo-bar flag.' The agent will get stuck when it thinks it must use that flag. Always provide an alternative."

How Not to Waste Your Life

Maria Popova · The Marginalian

Essayist Maria Popova explores a selection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essays and notebook entries, including one that evolved into The Scarlet Letter and others reflecting on what it means to truly live. "Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Inside Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It

Every

In Every’s "AI and I" series, Dan Shipper interviews Anthropic’s Cat and Boris, creators of Claude Code. "I think one of the really cool things about Claude Code being a terminal UI, and what made it work really well, is that Claude Code has access to everything that an engineer does at the terminal... It just means that okay, everything you can do, Claude Code can do. There's nothing in between."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

THIS IS WHAT'S KEEPING ME UP AT NIGHT

GREG ISENBERG

Greg Isenberg shares predictions on how AI will reshape employment, livestreaming, commerce, data privacy, and more. Two key takeaways: "The internet used to reward consistency. the new internet rewards experimentation. the faster you test, the faster you compound" and "an AI glut means deflation everywhere except in ideas. when intelligence is free, originality becomes priceless."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Cockroaches In The Coal Mine

Howard Marks

After First Brands' recent bankruptcy filing, Oaktree Capital cofounder Howard Marks reminds investors that losses are a normal part of taking risk. "In other words, many flawed decisions, which the economist Friedrich Hayek aptly described as 'malinvestment,' are made in booms and exposed in busts. It will ever be so. This is summed up most concisely in a great banking adage: 'The worst of loans are made in the best of times.'"

Hand-picked book of the week

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Following Maria Popova’s exploration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journals, we’re reminded of his best-known work, an American classic perfect for fall: The Scarlet Letter. With its atmospheric portrait of Puritan New England and its searching inquiry into guilt, revenge, and integrity, it's a short novel that endures.

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."

This edition of The Scarlet Letter is available through Standard Ebooks. Explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

The Science of Being

On The Science of Being, Lina writes lyrical essays on empathy, boundaries, and the stories that hold us. From the appetite of empathy: "the thorns and rocks have cut and battered me but i remain absurdly loyal to my empathy. i understand what damage feels like, and i understand this equally well. love cannot be held too tightly without losing what makes it love."

Wisereads Vol. 115 — Money Together by Heather and Douglas Boneparth, Tim Urban on toddlers, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt from Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, about Data General’s race to build minicomputers. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview of Heather and Douglas Boneparth's new release, Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

You Are How You Act

Andrew Bosworth · Boz.com

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth argues that the modern American self is shaped by a philosophical tension between two Enlightenment thinkers: Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He sees one worldview as more agentic than the other: "'Fake it until you make it' is often dismissed as shallow, but it’s closer to Franklin’s truth. Faking it long enough is making it. Repeated behavior, not sincere belief, shapes character. You become the kind of person who does what you repeatedly do."

Tales from Toddlerhood

Tim Urban · Wait But Why

Now a dad of two, Wait But Why creator Tim Urban reflects on toddlerhood’s wonder and madness: "It’s well-known that toddlers transform into mid-20th-century totalitarian dictators at the drop of a hat," and "Unintentionally, she’s a comedic genius... we had to rip a band-aid off her leg, after which she said, 'I am so perfectly sad,' and now my wife and I say that anytime we’re unhappy about something."

How to Keep Winning

Amjad Masad · Amasad.me

Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad shares six hard-won tactics for entrepreneurial success, from persistence: "Often, gold is only two strikes away. Don't let that be you," to focus: "I remember doing a spelling bee when I was maybe in third grade, standing in line waiting to get called on to spell the next word. I looked around me and all the other kids were talking and joking around. I thought that was strange. How could you ever win if you're not in the mindset of winning. If you're not locked in?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Steal the Productivity System I Taught to 6,642 Googlers

Jeff Su

Capture, organize, review, engage: these are the pillars of the CORE productivity system Jeff Su taught to thousands of Googlers to help them maximize their workdays. "The purpose of a system is to help us do the thing, even on our worst days, when we're tired, unmotivated, and don't feel like doing the thing... this is what made it click for me all those years ago, the short-term discomfort of adopting a new routine will always be less than the ongoing stress and disappointment of not making progress on my most important goals."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

New episode: "How Elon Works"

David Senra

Founders podcast host David Senra distills Elon Musk’s company-building principles after 60 hours of reading and research: "The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation" and "If you aren’t adding back at least 10% of the things you deleted, then you didn’t delete enough."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Surviving The AI Capex Boom

Kai Wu

Although Sparkline Capital is bullish on AI, founder Kai Wu remains cautious about investor prospects, especially as the Magnificent Seven shift from asset-light to asset-heavy models amid the AI buildout. "While the Magnificent 7 are extremely profitable, their net income will be dragged down over the next few years once depreciation charges from their surging capital expenditures kick in. Making some very rough assumptions, we estimate annual depreciation expense could climb from $150 to $400 billion over the next five years."

Hand-picked book of the week

Money Together

Heather and Douglas Boneparth

Household finances aren't just about budgets and spreadsheets. They're about identity, values, and the unspoken dynamics between couples. With grace, clarity, and wit, Heather and Douglas Boneparth share their own story alongside insights from therapists, psychologists, and financial experts to help couples navigate one of the greatest taboos: money.

"Nearly three in four married or cohabitating Americans believe money is a source of tension in their relationships. If you're a living, breathing person who has ever shared anything with anyone—even a roommate—this shouldn't come as a surprise. But I think statistics like these make it too easy to assume that all disputes over money are about solving scarcity problems. In other words, couples only fight over money because they don't have enough of it.

Forbes examined the relationships of the 50 richest people in the United States and found they got divorced at pretty much the same rate as the general population. Turns out, fortune and fame don't produce a different outcome. Couples have problems with money, whether they're naming their first used car or a university library together."

We're beyond thrilled Heather and Douglas are sharing an exclusive preview of their newly released book, Money Together, with Wisereads readers. If it resonates, we invite you to purchase a full copy here. 🙏

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

The Joint Account

On The Joint Account, this week's authors, financial advisor Douglas Boneparth and his wife Heather, a business director and former lawyer, share practical tips to help couples talk about money. From Estate planning is an act of love: "The irony here is that at some point in time, most of us will get sick. All of us will die. Any certainty we believe around these things is an illusion to help us cope with our discomfort. Therefore, preparing for anything is better than selling yourselves on one version of how things go, because that’s just not how life works."

Wisereads Vol. 114 — The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Alex Lieberman on training high-agency employees, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Warren Buffett's entire collection of Berkshire Hathaway letters, thoughtfully compiled into a single volume by Max Olson. This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, about Data General’s race to build minicomputers.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills

Barry Zhang, Keith Lazuka, and Mahesh Murag · Anthropic

The engineering team at Anthropic guides users through upleveling their agents with the newly released Skills. "Building a skill for an agent is like putting together an onboarding guide for a new hire. Instead of building fragmented, custom-designed agents for each use case, anyone can now specialize their agents with composable capabilities by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge."

The Majority AI View

Anil Dash · Anildash.com

A quiet majority in tech takes a more measured view of AI than the loudest boosters and critics. Writer and technologist Anil Dash sums it up: "Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

Attention is a luxury good

Seth Godin · Seth's Blog

Marketing expert Seth Godin knows how to capture consumer attention, so we’re all ears for his take on attention as a luxury good: "A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book... By 'wasting' our attention on nuance, narrative, experiences and everything except the checkbox takeaway, we’re sending a message to ourselves and others."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Dwarkesh Patel

Former Tesla and OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy joins Dwarkesh Patel to discuss the flaws of reinforcement learning, the future of education, and the breakthroughs needed before labs approach anything like AGI. "We're building ghosts or spirits or whatever people want to call it because we're not doing training by evolution. We're doing training by imitation of humans and the data that they've put on the Internet. You end up with these ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're mimicking humans. It's a different kind of intelligence."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I stole this idea and now use it with every employee

Alex Lieberman

Morning Brew cofounder Alex Lieberman shares a simple rubric from Steph Smith he uses to train high-agency employees: "Using this framework, here's what I say to every new employee… You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Perplexity at Work

Perplexity

Blocking distractions, scaling your abilities, and achieving results are the keys to great work, according to Perplexity AI. Their how-to guide on leveraging its product suite (the Comet Browser, Agent, email assistant, and more) includes prompts and tips to do just that. "This isn't about working longer hours or taking on more tasks. It's about working at the scale of your actual curiosity, finally able to pursue the questions that genuinely interest you with the rigor they deserve. You transform from someone who manages tasks to someone who explores possibilities."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder

When it came out in 1981, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine quickly became essential reading on the rise of the American tech industry. With thriller pacing and journalistic precision, it tells the story of Data General engineers racing to build a 32-bit minicomputer, capturing the obsession, ingenuity, and office politics of a pivotal moment in computing.

"In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design. It did mainly bookkeeping and math, by rote procedures, and it did them far more quickly than they had ever been done before."

Through the end of October, you can grab the full ebook for $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Matt Brown's Notes

Matrix Partners investor Matt Brown writes crisp strategy notes on fintech and vertical software, complete with smart sketches and visuals. From Your data model is your destiny: "Product market fit is the startup holy grail. “Product” and “market” are essential, but a startup’s data model is the dark matter that holds them together."

Wisereads Vol. 113 — The collected Berkshire Hathaway letters, Andrej Karpathy's nanochat, and more

Last week, we shared a collection of Marc Andreessen’s timeless blog posts from 2007 to 2009: 200 pages of startup and leadership wisdom in one ebook. This week, we're sharing a preview of Warren Buffett's entire collection of Berkshire Hathaway letters, thoughtfully compiled into a single volume by Max Olson.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The New World

Jeremy Stern · Colossus

Editor Jeremy Stern sits down with Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, to explore how legacy has shaped his entrepreneurial path. The son of a real estate mogul and grandson of Holocaust survivors, Kushner reflects on ambition, identity, and values: "'The tension I often feel is that you always have to be pushing forward, but you can never forget where you came from,' Josh said. 'My biggest fear is … what is the line? 'Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.' You always need to stay rooted in your values and in the things that actually matter. We are here through incredible determination, hard work, creativity, and tenacity.'"

Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

Jesse Vincent · Massively Parallel Procrastination

Jesse Vincent is giving his Claude agents superpowers with skills built through the newly released plugin system, making it possible for them to improve themselves. "I haven't published all the skills Claude and I have built, because some of them are a little esoteric and some of the ones I've played with come from telling Claude 'Here's my copy of programming book. Please read the book and pull out reusable skills that weren't obvious to you before you started reading'... This is, I think, one of the foundational ideas in how all this works."

Everything Is Television

Derek Thompson · Derek Thompson's Substack

Social media, podcasts, and AI video tools are all evolving toward the same destination: endless streams of short-form video, notes Derek Thompson. "In mathematics, the word 'attractor' describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. To take a classic example: Drop a marble into a bowl, and it will trace several loops around the bowl’s curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain. Complex systems often settle into recurring forms, if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How Did The World Get So Ugly?

The Cultural Tutor | Sheehan Quirke

Standing beside the River Thames in London, Sheehan Quirke reflects on how Victorian design made even the most utilitarian spaces beautiful, including the city’s sewers. "Why shouldn’t people who work in sewers also have a beautiful place of work? That is how the Victorians thought. But there’s more: there was also a sense of pride, a belief that what they’d done here was worthwhile, that it meant something. And the result, over a century later, this place, a sewage facility, is now a museum, a tourist destination. If you want to know what any society really believes in, just look at how they design their sewers."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Excited to release new repo: nanochat!

Andrej Karpathy

With a cloud GPU and Andrej Karpathy’s latest repo, you can now spin up your own mini LLM, chat interface included. "Unlike my earlier similar repo nanoGPT which only covered pretraining, nanochat is a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single, dependency-minimal codebase. You boot up a cloud GPU box, run a single script and in as little as 4 hours later you can talk to your own LLM in a ChatGPT-like web UI."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples

Alexandra Souly, Javier Rando, Ed Chapman, et al.

Anthropic, the Alan Turing Institute, and the UK AI Security Institute share an alarming finding: even in the largest language models, it only takes a few hundred documents to corrupt a dataset. "Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data... 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data."

Hand-picked book of the week

Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders

Warren E. Buffett, edited by Max Olson

For the past 60 years, Warren Buffett has delivered witty, insightful letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. Now, Max Olson has compiled those letters, unedited and without interpretation, into a single volume that chronicles the transformation of a struggling textile company with $25 million in equity into a trillion-dollar conglomerate. The result is a uniquely readable record of Buffett’s evolving philosophy, shaped alongside the late Charlie Munger.

"Sometimes I’ve made mistakes in assessing the future economics of a business I’ve purchased for Berkshire — each a case of capital allocation gone wrong... The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called 'thumb-sucking.' Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be."

We’re thrilled Max is sharing a preview of his compilation with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the format, the full edition is available now in hardcover and Kindle.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

FutureBlind

When he’s not compiling books on influential companies, Mashgin’s Max Olson occasionally drops gems on business, tech, design, and investing via his Substack, FutureBlind. From Advantage Flywheels: "The most successful moats have multiple flywheels that feed off of each other’s momentum. Google’s technical advantages enable stronger brand allegiance and vice versa. Coca-Cola's marketing-driven brand feeds off of its distributor/bottler based network effects. Facebook’s brands have at least 3 reinforcing network effects: direct (social network), 2-sided aggregator (advertising and developers), and brand-driven social proof."

Wisereads Vol. 112 — The Pmarca Blog Archives, Stratechery's Ben Thompson on Sora and Meta AI, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive copy of Eliot Peper's latest release, Ensorcelled, an adventurous short story praised by Samuel Arbesman, Kevin Kelly, and Craig Mod. This week, we’re featuring a collection of Marc Andreessen’s timeless blog posts from 2007 to 2009: 200 pages of startup and leadership wisdom in one ebook.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Stop Avoiding Politics

Matheus Lima · Terrible Software

After stints as a software engineer at companies like Carta and Tremendous, Matheus Lima is making the case for engaging in workplace politics so the best ideas actually get built. "The alternative to good politics isn’t no politics. It’s bad politics winning by default. It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up. It’s good projects dying because nobody advocated for them. It’s talented people leaving because they couldn’t navigate the organizational dynamics."

Part 2: Guide to Big Companies: Retaining great people

Marc Andreessen · Pmarchive

In an oldie but goodie post, Marc Andreessen walks leaders through the keys to retaining talent. Rule number one: build a winning company. "All the raises, perks, and HR-sponsored “company values” drafting sessions in the world won’t help you retain great people if you’re not winning—not even the $6,000 heated Japanese toilets in all the restrooms, the $30,000 Olympic lap pool out back, and the free $4 bottles of organic orange juice in all the snack rooms." Keep reading to explore more of Andreessen's guides in the ebook archive below.

Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption

Ben Thompson · Stratechery

Ben Thompson initially predicted Meta’s AI video app would outshine OpenAI’s Sora, believing users would favor consumption over creation. This week’s App Store rankings suggest the opposite. "What I didn’t fully appreciate, however, is what falls in the middle: the fact that so many more people get to be creators, and what a blessing that is. How many people have had ideas in their head, yet were incapable of substantiating them, and now can?... why should I begrudge the latest unbundling, and the many more people who will benefit from AI substantiation of their creative impulses? Bicycles for all!"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Let the LLM Write the Prompts: An Intro to DSPy in Compound AI Pipelines

Databricks

Data science leader Drew Breunig shows how to use DSPy to replace prompt engineering guesswork with a Python-based pipeline. "We write tasks. We don’t write prompts. We can use DSPy to optimize our function against our eval data to make sure that our prompt is accountable and performing. And we can embrace model portability. When a new model gets released, we switch over, we run our optimization against our eval, and we’re off to the races."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

You have 12 shots in life

Jessy

An intern with his whole career ahead of him, Jessy breaks his working life into 12 four-year chapters: 12 chances to do something that matters. "This changes everything about how to play. You don't need to be right 100% of the time. You need to be really right 20% of the time. Sometimes, you just need to be really right once out of 12 shots - that's only 8% success rate for extraordinary impact."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks

Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

Researcher Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau improves performance on complex tasks like Sudoku and maze solving by reducing network size and layer count. "The benefit from recursive reasoning can be massively improved... We propose Tiny Recursive Model (TRM), an improved and simplified approach using a much smaller tiny network with only 2 layers that achieves significantly higher generalization than HRM on a variety of problems. In doing so, we improve the state-of-the-art test accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme from 55% to 87%, Maze-Hard from 75% to 85%."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Pmarca Blog Archives

Marc Andreessen

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Kevin Kelly

On his newly launched Substack, Wired's Senior Maverick and prolific author Kevin Kelly writes about AI, technology, history, and progress. From Hill-Making vs Hill-Climbing: "There are two modes of learning, two paths to improvement. One is to relentlessly, deliberately improve what you can do already, by trying to perfect your process. Focus on optimizing what works. The other way is to create new areas that can be exploited and perfected. Explore regions that are suboptimal with a hope you can make them work – and sometimes they will – giving you new territory to work in."

Wisereads Vol. 111 — Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper, Uri Bram on throwing good parties, and more

Last week, we shared Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a brief but foundational work of existentialist literature. This week, we're sharing an exclusive copy of Eliot Peper's latest release, Ensorcelled, an adventurous short story praised by Samuel Arbesman, Kevin Kelly, and Craig Mod.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Best Way to Use AI for Learning

詹雨安 Alan Chan · Heptabase on Medium

Heptabase co-founder and CEO Alan Chan explains how he uses AI and a digital whiteboard to deepen rather than just broaden his learning. "I think the most important question to ask is not 'how to learn more efficiently,' but 'how to become capable of learning knowledge that is more complex, abstract, and challenging.' At the end of the day, I believe the value of learning does not lie in accumulating as much knowledge as possible, but in cultivating the ability to think more deeply about important questions."

Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

Julian Schrittwieser · Julian.ac

Amid mixed reviews of the latest AI model releases, Anthropic researcher Julian Schrittwieser turns to the data to forecast steady gains. "Even a relatively conservative extrapolation of these trends suggests that 2026 will be a pivotal year for the widespread integration of AI into the economy: Models will be able to autonomously work for full days (8 working hours) by mid-2026. At least one model will match the performance of human experts across many industries before the end of 2026."

21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties

Uri Bram · Atoms vs Bits

Author and party game-maker Uri Bram reveals what makes a great gathering, just in time for the holidays. His advice includes: "Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too" and "A large party is more like an Everything Soup: you mainly need to avoid ingredients that ruin the flavor for everyone else; beyond that you can mostly throw in whatever and see what works."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

40 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew In My 20s

Daniel Pink

Drawing on his experience advising companies and working in the White House, author Daniel Pink shares rapid-fire, no-nonsense advice he wishes he had known earlier in his career: "Don't work with some people; including a few talented people who are jerks. You might believe you can change them, tolerate them, or steer around them. You can't. They're toxic. In the end, they'll poison you" and "Curiosity beats certainty. You'll believe some things deeply, and that can be good... whenever you're feeling especially certain, whenever you know you're totally right, ask yourself, why might I be wrong?"
 

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Given its status as one of the great American business biographies, I decided to read Titan

Patrick Collison

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison reflects on his reading of Titan by Ron Chernow, which follows the infamous John D. Rockefeller and the rise of Standard Oil. "Certain periods seem more propitious for the rise of noteworthy figures, at least in business: Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller were all born in a four year span. (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also born in the same year.) I wonder how much of this is about the culture vs the business opportunities. More generally, I hadn’t appreciated the fervor (as perceived at the time) of the late 19th century."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance On Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks

Tejal Pathwardhan, Rachel Dias, Elizabeth Proch, et al.

OpenAI introduces GDPval, a new benchmark designed to simulate real-world tasks from 44 occupations across key sectors of the U.S. economy. "We find that frontier model performance on GDPval is improving roughly linearly over time, and that the current best frontier models are approaching industry experts in deliverable quality. We analyze the potential for frontier models, when paired with human oversight, to perform GDPval tasks cheaper and faster than unaided experts."

Hand-picked book of the week

Ensorcelled

Eliot Peper

In this punchy short story, Tam reluctantly skips the release of the much-anticipated game Ark of the Shadow Moon for a camping trip. What follows is a gripping tale about what can happen when you put down the distractions and pay close attention to the world around you.

"You could become so bewitched by a seductive elsewhere that you missed out on ever being truly here, and yet, elsewhere was sometimes exactly where you needed to go."

We're thrilled that Eliot is sharing a full copy of Ensorcelled with Wisereads readers before its official release. If you enjoy the story, you can purchase a signed copy on his website, look out for the Kindle and audio editions on October 8th, or explore his other work here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Manuscriptions

Although we exclude our own content from Wisereads, we’d be remiss not to spotlight our QA specialist’s Substack. On Manuscriptions, Eleanor Konik shares book reviews, behind-the-scenes looks at her Obsidian + Readwise-powered workflows, and thoughtful lessons drawn from history, science, and everyday life. From The Konik Method for Organizing Electronic Notes: "My point here is not to suggest that you should use my tagging schema... My point is that it is helpful to have a tagging schema that is customized to your preferences and reasons for reading. What are you interested in? What motivates you to take notes on books at all?"

Wisereads Vol. 110 — Robin Guo on Life is Poker, Not Chess, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and more

Last week, we shared The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori's radical exploration of curiosity-led education. This week, we're sharing Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a brief but foundational work of existentialist literature.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Abundant Intelligence

Sam Altman · Blog.samaltman.com

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has unveiled plans for a new factory aimed at pushing past current compute limits to pursue bold goals like curing cancer and tutoring for every student. "Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. The execution of this will be extremely difficult; it will take us years to get to this milestone and it will require innovation at every level of the stack, from chips to power to building to robotics."

Boring is good

Scott Jenson · Jenson.org

UX design veteran Scott Jenson predicts that Small Language Models will steadily replace larger general-purpose models in niche use cases, describing a future that's far less glamorous than headlines suggest. "Ultimately, a mature technology doesn’t look like magic; it looks like infrastructure. It gets smaller, more reliable, and much more boring. We’re here to solve problems, not look cool."

Life is Poker, Not Chess

Robin Guo · The Bird's Nest

As an investor at a16z, Robin Guo draws on his poker background not just in business, but in life. He shares how probability, table selection, bluffing, and variance come into play in everyday decisions. "Chess assumes a controlled environment: perfect information, one opponent, predictable outcomes. Life is much messier. Life is multiple players with hidden cards, changing rules, and luck that can absolutely demolish skill in any given hand. Once you start seeing life through the poker lens, you realize most people are playing chess in a poker world. No wonder they're frustrated when the "right" moves don't pay off."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Wait... Smart Glasses are Suddenly Good?

Marques Brownlee

Just ten months after roasting Meta’s prototype Orion AR glasses, Marques Brownlee is now raving about their successor: the Meta Ray-Ban Display, soon to hit shelves. "And as I'm getting to try these, I just keep thinking, 'The rate of improvement is kind of insane.'...  it got me thinking about if it could bring us closer to a post-smartphone world, which is obviously still super far away."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Humanoid Thesis

Andrew Kang

Mechanism founder and investor Andrew Kang explains why his firm believes general-purpose humanoid robots will take center stage, and why they’re backing companies like Apptronik and Figure. "Why do they have to look like humans? Because we’ve already built the world for humans. Door handles, shelves, forklifts, stairs—it’s all optimized for two arms, two legs, and a certain height. You can’t beat a form factor that’s natively interoperable with everything. We’ve optimized hundreds of years of infrastructure around human ergonomics."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Nine Things I Learned In Ninety Years

Edward Packard

At the age of 94, Edward Packard, ideator and writer of Bantam’s first Choose Your Own Adventure book, reflects on some hard-earned wisdom. "Professor Korsgaard says, 'Your movements have to come from your constitutional rule over yourself. Otherwise, you’ll be ruled by a heap of impulses.' That permeated my consciousness. If you aren’t self-constituted, if you aren’t unified, if you don’t have integrity, you’ll be a mess."

Hand-picked book of the week

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground drags readers into the mind of a brilliant, self-sabotaging narrator who dismantles neat ideas about reason, progress, and free will. Unsettling, razor-sharp, and surprisingly funny, it laid the groundwork for existentialist fiction to come; perfect for readers who like their big ideas delivered with bite.

"I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness."

This edition of Notes from Underground is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

High Agency

After his viral essay on high agency, George Mack launched a Substack to keep the conversation going around one of the most valued skills of our time. From 10 ideas for overthinkers: "The low agency model of time has three modes: Past, present and future. The high agency model of time has five modes: Past-dwelling, past rectifying, present, future-worrying, and future-building. The low agency model of time assumes all time spent thinking about the past and the future is the same. It’s not. Rectifying the past is 100x better than dwelling on it. Building the future is 100x better than worrying about it."

Wisereads Vol. 109 — AI Will Not Make You Rich by Jerry Neumann, Becoming the person who does the thing, and more

Last week, we shared Emily Brontë's Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, just in time for the fall season. This week, we're sharing The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori's radical exploration of curiosity-led education.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI Will Not Make You Rich

Jerry Neumann · Colossus

Investor and author Jerry Neumann contrasts computer-era investors with those of containerization, arguing AI resembles the latter: a late-stage innovation where consumers, not investors, capture most of the value. "It’s the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today. No one took note of personal computers in the 1970s. In 2025, AI is all we seem to talk about."

Becoming the person who does the thing

Fred Rivett · Fredrivett.com

Quoting James Clear and Paul the Apostle, Fred Rivett offers a valuable reminder that action follows identity: "If you identify as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place."

Writing effective tools for agents — with agents

Anthropic · Anthropic

In its succinct, practical guide to building tools for agents, Anthropic highlights key practices for the best results: "When writing tool descriptions and specs, think of how you would describe your tool to a new hire on your team. Consider the context that you might implicitly bring—specialized query formats, definitions of niche terminology, relationships between underlying resources—and make it explicit."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

You're Not Busy, You're Emotionally Overwhelmed

Joe Hudson

Executive coaches Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson explore why 80% of Americans feel time-starved, even with more time-saving tools than ever. "We jump into our phones because there, we’re not thinking about the future... And so what is time scarcity really? On some level, it’s emotional overwhelm. And the other thing is: it’s just not being present. It’s being in the future. It’s thinking about the task that you have to do while you’re doing another task, which is insanely stressful."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

We grew from zero to $50M ARR in <2 years

Grant Lee

On a mission to reinvent the modern slide deck, Grant Lee and his team uncovered key levers for profitable growth, including dogfooding: "Either you build something that's 100x better than alternatives, or you build something else. Dogfooding makes it painfully obvious if your product isn't a 100x better," and influencer marketing: "90% of your reach comes from <10% of content that goes viral. Your job: go broad with influencers and spend enough to find that 10% of content and formats that work."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

How People Use ChatGPT

Aaron Chatterji, Tom Cunningham, David Deming, et al.

As of July 2025, 10% of the world’s adult population is using ChatGPT in some form. In a working paper, the US National Bureau of Economic Research analyzes anonymized data to understand how people are prompting the LLM. "'Practical Guidance,' 'Seeking Information,' and 'Writing' are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Montessori Method

Maria Montessori

"Even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child's level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child."

This historical text offers a look at the origins of the Montessori movement and one approach to nurturing lifelong learners.

We’re sharing the edition available for free through Project Gutenberg, the digital library founded by ebook pioneer Michael Hart. Explore their full catalog of over 75,000 titles here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Works in Progress

Seasoned writers gather at Works in Progress, a Stripe magazine focused on new and underrated ideas to improve the world. Topics range from economic growth and technology to history, metascience, medical research, and more. From Magical systems thinking: "The temptation will be to use this vast increase in computational power and intelligence to 'solve' systems design for once and for all. But the same laws that limited Forrester continue to bind: 'NEW SYSTEMS CREATE NEW PROBLEMS' and 'THE SYSTEM ALWAYS KICKS BACK'. As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility."

Wisereads Vol. 108 — Alex McCann on the death of the corporate job, Wuthering Heights, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Gelong Thubten's Handbook for Hard Times: A monk's guide to fearless living, complete with a meditation prompt. This week, we're sharing Emily Brontë's Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, just in time for the fall season.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The death of the corporate job.

Alex McCann · Still Wandering

Many corporate professionals are now candid about using their 9-to-5 jobs to fund the work they truly care about. Writer Alex McCann captures the surreal nature of this arrangement: "It's like a corporate version of the emperor's new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we've all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it."

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

Rogé Karma · The Atlantic

Writer Rogé Karma wonders if AI might be the next email: a tool that feels productive but actually slows us down. His deeper concern, though, is how the hype could unravel. "Generative AI would not be the first tech fad to experience a wave of excessive hype. What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy. More than half of the growth of the S&P 500 since 2023 has come from just seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. These firms, collectively known as the Magnificent Seven, are seen as especially well positioned to prosper from the AI revolution."

Being good isn’t enough

Josh Swords · People, ideas, machines

Early in your career, being technically strong might be enough. But as you grow, Data and AI Engineering leader Josh Swords explains, you’ll need to bring more to the table to create impact and advance. "The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.

Harvard Business Review

Author and professor Arthur C. Brooks explains that boredom is essential for working through life’s biggest questions and finding meaning. "If every time you're slightly bored you pull out your phone, it's going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning, and that's the recipe for depression and anxiety, and a sense of hollowness, which, by the way, are all through the roof."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Why retention is so hard for new tech products

Andrew Chen

As a partner at a16z, Andrew Chen has analyzed more than his fair share of retention curves. In his latest tweet, he shares hard-earned insights: "You can’t fix bad retention. No, adding more notifications will not fix your retention curve. You can’t A/B test your way to good retention," and "Retention goes down, it doesn’t go up. And weirdly, it decays (oh, does it decay) at a predictable half life. Early retention predicts later retention."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Why Language Models Hallucinate

Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, Santosh S. Vempala, and Edwin Zhang

OpenAI’s latest paper digs into why large language models continue to confidently give wrong answers, comparing evaluations to multiple-choice exams that reward guessing. "When uncertain, students may guess on multiple-choice exams and even bluff on written exams, submitting plausible answers in which they have little confidence. Language models are evaluated by similar tests. In both settings, guessing when unsure maximizes the expected score under a binary 0-1 scheme that awards 1 point for a correct answer and none for blanks or IDKs."

Hand-picked book of the week

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë published only one novel, but Wuthering Heights has haunted readers for over a century. When the kindly Mr. Earnshaw brings home a ragged foundling named Heathcliff, he sets off a storm of jealousy and revenge that entangles two Yorkshire families and echoes across generations. As the weather cools in the northern hemisphere, we’re craving an atmospheric classic to ease us into fall; Wuthering Heights fits the bill.

"I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it."

This edition of Wuthering Heights is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Futureproof

Sophia Sun, an AI product manager, writes futureproof: a newsletter about designing a career, building products, and staying creative in the age of AI. From 7 skills I'm betting on to future-proof my career: "Building and conveying your conviction: There's something energizing and irreplaceable about conviction that isn’t 'manufactured,' but earned. Not from skimming AI summaries or leaning on secondhand data, but from lived experience."

Wisereads Vol. 107 — Handbook for Hard Times by Gelong Thubten, Farnam Street on Irrational Dedication, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Brian Potter’s upcoming debut, The Origins of Efficiency, a historically rich exploration of innovation and progress. This week, we're sharing a preview of Gelong Thubten's Handbook for Hard Times: A monk's guide to fearless living, complete with a meditation prompt.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones

Abhishek Chakraborty

Modern life urges us to keep adding. But Abhishek Chakraborty argues that real progress comes from subtraction: "When Michelangelo was asked about how he carved the masterpiece of all masterpieces, the statue of David, his answer was: 'It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.' Focus on obtaining negative knowledge, because perfection is simply the practice of eliminating the unnecessary and the unimportant."

Irrational Dedication

Shane Parrish · Farnam Street

Instead of taking the world’s infrastructure for granted, Shane Parrish invites readers to see each building as a monument to irrational commitment. "Behind every seemingly effortless success lies a landscape of invisible battles: endless meetings, self-doubts, and moments of near-total collapse. What truly separates people isn’t some magical talent, but an almost irrational commitment to pushing through pain that would break most people."

I Am An AI Hater

Anthony Moser · Moser's frame shop

Folk and blues musician Anthony Moser skips the careful case against AI and opts for a plain human response: being a hater. "Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Python: The Documentary | An origin story

CultRepo (formerly Honeypot)

Python began as a side project in 1990s Amsterdam, nearly fading before becoming the backbone of AI, data science, and modern tech. Featuring Guido van Rossum and fellow pioneers, this documentary charts the language’s unlikely rise. "Today, I think it’s safe to say that almost anywhere there’s a computer, there’s probably some Python. It’s literally on Mars."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Everything you've been told about burnout is wrong

Blake Scholl

Boom Supersonic’s CEO challenges conventional wisdom on burnout, noting his team had to unlock motivation before breaking the sound barrier. "Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out, too unattainable, too abstract."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Canaries In The Coal Mine? Six Facts About The Recent Employment Effects Of Artificial Intelligence

Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, Ruyu Chen

Using data from the largest payroll provider in the United States, Stanford researchers reveal a shift in the job market for entry-level professionals. "Since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks... employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor."

Hand-picked book of the week

Handbook for Hard Times: A monk's guide to fearless living

Gelong Thubten

After his mentor and close friend of 20 years was brutally murdered, Gelong Thubten’s decades of cultivated peace were put to the test. In his Handbook for Hard Times, he shares how happiness, kindness, and resilience can still arise from the darkest chapters, drawing on his life as a Buddhist monk, meditation teacher, and fellow human learning to meet suffering with compassion.

"We humans have built rockets to the moon and are now able to send telescopes beyond our solar system, but we find it hard to deal with what goes on inside our own heads and hearts. We seem to have evolved externally but not internally, looking outwards but not inwards.

We seek happiness but rarely do we understand that to find it, we must transform our minds. We wish to avoid suffering, but seldom do we realise that the solution is to change how we think."

Through the end of September, you can grab the full ebook, complete with meditation prompts, for $1.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Doublethink

Lewis O'Brien thinks best by turning ideas and mental models into doodles. His Substack, Doublethink, is a haven for visual learners. From The Great Mental Models: Visual Book Summary: "Constant speed in the wrong direction is counter-productive. It is more important to pay attention to where you are going than how quickly you will get there."

Wisereads Vol. 106 — The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, Mustafa Suleyman on building AI for people, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Austin Kleon's original illustrated hit, Steal Like an Artist. This week, we're sharing an excerpt from Brian Potter’s upcoming debut, The Origins of Efficiency, a historically rich exploration of innovation and progress.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Class Dismissed

Jeremy Stern · Colossus

After stepping back from the spotlight to raise his kids, Trilogy founder Joe Liemandt has returned as principal of an AI-powered school in Austin, Texas. In the classroom, his interviewer observed: "I notice that all the fourth graders have a column that just says 'Wharton MBA simulation.' 'Come on,' I said to Liemandt. 'Nope, it’s true,' he smiled. 'We required them all to pass the Wharton MBA Teamwork and Leadership Simulation. They all did it. Keep in mind our kindergartners have to climb a 40-foot rock wall and pass a "Receive critical feedback without crying" workshop. By fourth grade they’re pretty tough.'"

How ChatGPT Surprised Me

Ezra Klein · The New York Times

We must build AI for people; not to be a person

Mustafa Suleyman · Mustafa-suleyman.ai

Seemingly Conscious AI, or SCAI, is what Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman fears most. He warns that poorly designed interfaces could exploit our instinct to attribute consciousness: "I will never know what it’s like to be you; you will never be quite sure that I am conscious. All you can do is infer it. But the point is that, nonetheless, it comes naturally to us to attribute consciousness to other humans. This inference is effortless."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Unlock Unlimited Motivation With This Hidden Brain Switch

Rian Doris

Flow researcher Rian Doris recalls feeling trapped in an endless grind until he uncovered the five factors of intrinsic motivation: curiosity, purpose, mastery, autotelicity, and autonomy. "Intrinsic fuel works better than extrinsic fuel and it compounds; it makes hard work easy, leading to an upward spiral of skill development and access to flow state, that optimal state of consciousness where we lose ourselves in deep immersion within our work."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Continuing the journey of optimal LLM-assisted coding experience

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy shares an update on how AI now supports his coding workflow: "The bread & butter (~75%?) of my LLM assistance continues to be just (Cursor) tab complete," while his "Final layer of defense is GPT5 Pro, which I go to for the hardest things... [it] actually finds a really subtle bug. It is very strong. It can dig up all kinds of esoteric docs and papers."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The GenAI Divide: State Of AI In Business 2025

MIT

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab reveal a startling statistic in their latest paper: most large-scale AI initiatives are failing. "Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return... Just 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L impact."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Origins of Efficiency

Brian Potter

The stories we tell about innovation often tie up history in neat little bows. In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter digs deeper, revealing that beyond invention lies process efficiency, the overlooked driver of progress that transforms lives.

Take penicillin: you’ve likely heard the story of Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery. And yet, it took another decade before scientists could isolate enough of the antibiotic to save a single life.

"Prior to the emergence of antibiotics, bacterial illnesses were responsible for approximately 20 percent of all deaths in the US. Between 1936 and 1952, deaths from bacterial illnesses in the US dropped by nearly 70 percent. By some estimates, antibiotics have extended average human lifespan by 23 years. The initial discovery of penicillin was, of course, necessary to these later achievements. But it was only by making antibiotics cheap and widely available—that is, by producing them efficiently—that this miracle medicine was able to save millions of lives."

As longtime fans of Brian's work, we’re thrilled he's sharing a preview of his forthcoming Stripe Press book with Wisereads readers. If it sparks your curiosity as it did ours, you can preorder The Origins of Efficiency before its September 23rd release here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Velvet Noise

Inspired by Henrik Karlsson to treat blogging as a query to find fascinating people, Maja began writing thoughtful explorations of the human experience on her Substack, Velvet Noise. From why some conversations rearrange your brain: "We move through the world assuming we’ve mapped the people closest to us. We know their coffee orders, their dating history, the last podcast they recommended. But these are surface echoes, tidy exports of interior life. And interior life is rarely tidy."

Wisereads Vol. 105 — Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, everything Kevin Kelly knows about self-publishing, and more

Last week, we shared Tim Ferriss' The Tao of Seneca: Volume One, the first installment drawn from Seneca the Younger’s timeless epistolary wisdom. This week, we're sharing a preview of Austin Kleon's original illustrated hit, Steal Like an Artist.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Book Review: The Math Academy Way

ifjen · The Education of Isabel

Justin Skycak's The Math Academy Way outlines his approach to teaching math through software, but Substack writer ifjen found deeper insights on automaticity and knowledge graphs that will intrigue any lifelong learner. "Millions of man hours have been spent pretending to learn things by watching youtube videos. If you draft a knowledge graph, you can make yourself a road map towards actual ability. A scaffolded approach focuses practice hours on discrete skills of appropriate difficulty given your current competences and helps you evaluate your progress."

Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software

Conrad Irwin · Zed.dev

After interviewing countless software engineers, Superhuman co-founder Conrad Irwin has come to appreciate one thing they do that large language models can’t: maintain a mental model. "When you watch someone who knows what they are doing, you'll see them looping over the following steps: (1) Build a mental model of the requirements (2) Write code that (hopefully?!) does that (3) Build a mental model of what the code actually does (4) Identify the differences, and update the code (or the requirements)."

Everything I know about good system design

Sean Goedecke · Seangoedecke.com

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

From Noob to Automated Evals In A Week (as a PM)

Hamel Husain and Teresa Torres

When Teresa Torres tested her LLM-powered coach, systematic evaluations exposed surprising failures. Her path to improvement involved automating feedback, continuous iteration, and resisting the urge to adopt too many new tools at once. "Why did I use Airtable? This is a tool that I’m familiar with; I already had plenty to learn. This is going to be a theme of this talk: I try to limit how much I have to learn in each step so that I don’t get overwhelmed."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Everything I've learned about drawing after 78 days of teaching

Kevin

On a side quest to learn to draw, Epic Gardening founder Kevin explored shading, perspective, and shape manipulation. His takeaways include: "Every object you can draw can be constructed from the four basic forms: box, sphere, pyramid, cylinder," and "Because everything we see IRL is just a light reflection, it's the most important thing in drawing too."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Everything I Know About Self-Publishing

Kevin Kelly

Bestselling author Kevin Kelly guides creatives and writers through the publishing pipeline, covering the tradeoffs of traditional publishing and how to self-publish once you’ve found true fans. "The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle. I’d write in public installments, as a subscription newsletter, or e-book single chapters, or simple posts on my blog. If I could find an audience that wanted more of the material, I’d rewrite, re-edit, re-compose the material into a longer form. I’d release that as an ebook, and/or on-demand printed book sold in my Shopify shop."

Hand-picked book of the week

Steal Like an Artist

Austin Kleon

Write the books you want to read, and make the movies you want to watch. Better yet, don’t be afraid to bring those dreams to life by standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before. Remixing and reimagining what’s already out there as you follow your curiosity just might unlock your life’s work.

In his illustrated hit Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon urges creators to draw inspiration from everywhere, not chase originality for its own sake:

"What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere... Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer André Gide put it, 'Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.' 

If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it."

We’re longtime fans of Austin's work and thrilled to share a preview of Steal Like an Artist. Through the end of August, grab the full ebook for just $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Moonshots

Social scientist James Horton writes story-driven essays that combine psychology, culture, and nerdy deep-dives, from fanfiction stats to the science of charisma. From The Nonwriter's Guide to Writing A Lot: "Let’s start with an observation: You are already a prolific writer... That seems prodigious, but if you look at your own correspondence — every email, text, and post, every tweet you’ve cast into the soulless void that is Twitter — you will likely find that you have written more, by this point in your life, than Gandhi’s entire life’s work. You’re an internet user. A netizen; you write more text as an afterthought each day than most people pre-1980 did on purpose."

Wisereads Vol. 104 — Gary Marcus on GPT-5, The Tao of Seneca with Tim Ferriss, and more

Last week, we shared Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, his 19th-century social satire and masterclass in abstraction. This week, we're sharing Tim Ferriss' The Tao of Seneca: Volume One, the first installment drawn from Seneca the Younger’s timeless epistolary wisdom.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Hire people who give a shit.

Alexandr Wang · Rational in the Fullness of Time

Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale, has been around the hiring block. It's no surprise his no-frills advice on hiring people who give a shit about the mission and their work is circulating again: "If someone is applying to Scale and has never been deeply obsessed about something before, then it’s a bad bet to think Scale will be the first. I have a particular line of questioning around this: What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something? How many hours were you working a week? Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?"

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.

Gary Marcus · Marcus on AI

After the Death Star-level hype around GPT-5 and the release-week letdown among OpenAI fans, Gary Marcus is taking a victory lap: "By the end of the night, OpenAI’s street cred had dramatically fallen. On the question of 'which company [will have] the best AI model at the end of August', a Polymarket poll charted OpenAI dropping from 75% to 14% in the space of an hour."

Different Kinds of Smart

Morgan Housel · Collab Fund

During the greatest bull market of all time, the "smartest" investors at Long Term Capital Management went broke. That leads author Morgan Housel to one conclusion: there’s more to being smart than narrow expertise. "Being an expert in economics would help you understand the world if the world were governed purely by economics. But it’s not... Someone with B+ intelligence in several fields likely has a better grasp of how the world works than someone with A+ intelligence in one field but an ignorance of that field just being one piece of a complicated puzzle."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

I've read 613 business books - these 16 will make you RICH

Anthony Vicino

Anthony Vicino, once $75K in debt and now a thriving entrepreneur and best-selling author, reveals the books that helped him turn his fortune around. On mindset: "I recommend you go straight to the primary sources, one of which is this book, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca." On health: "Outlive by Peter Attia. This book lays out a comprehensive framework for not only living longer, but living better." On wealth: "My all-time favorite book on the topic of money is called How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis... Very, very few billionaires have ever written books on money, and so when they do, it's generally worth paying attention to what they have to say." On skills: "Traction by Gino Wickman. This is the closest thing you're going to find to an out-of-the-box operating system that you can immediately plug into your business."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I’ve got bad news

Adam Butler

Another creator closely following AI weighs in on GPT-5’s release, joining the chorus that scaling current models won’t deliver the breakthroughs once promised. "The problem isn’t that the models stopped improving. It’s that the improvements we need are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Every step up the scaling laws now demands a city’s worth of electricity and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of GPUs."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens

Arizona State University

Cited by Gary Marcus in his reflection on AI progress, a new Arizona State University paper questions whether so-called “reasoning” models can generalize beyond their training data: "The apparent reasoning prowess of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is largely a brittle mirage... CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Tao of Seneca

Tim Ferriss

Although Stoicism has seen a resurgence thanks to creative authors and influencers, nothing compares to returning to the source. As entrepreneur and this week’s video subject Anthony Vicino notes: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, or Letters from a Stoic, remains essential reading.

In these 124 letters written late in life, Seneca the Younger offers timeless advice on topics like despising death, brains and brawns, discursive reading, and groundless fears.

"There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."

We're thrilled to revisit Tim Ferriss' The Tao of Seneca: Volume One, which features the first segment of these letters, along with original illustrations, profiles of modern Stoics, interviews, and more. Volumes Two and Three are also free! 🎉

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Mindbox

Recent Harvard neuroscience graduate Yana Yuhai launched a Substack on practical neuroscience for self-discovery and well-being. From how to pay attention again (the neuroscience of focus in the age of everything): "This loss of agency over our own attention that many of us are experiencing is not about willpower. It’s about neuroscience: The brain is wired to seek novelty. When something new pops up (a notification, a headline, a banner), your dopamine system lights up. And dopamine isn’t just about pleasure; it’s about anticipation. In other words, it’s the thrill of what might be next that hooks you."

Wisereads Vol. 103 — Learn Like an Athlete by David Perell, Flatland by Edwin Abbott, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Ed Latimore's recent release, Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. This week, we're sharing Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, his 19th-century social satire and masterclass in abstraction.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Vibe code is legacy code

Steve Krouse · Val Town

Founder-engineer Steve Krouse likens vibe coding to legacy code, exploring when AI-powered rapid development works best and when careful, intentional coding is needed. "We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code... When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it!"

Learn Like an Athlete

David Perell · Perell.com

Great minds think alike: last week, Tyler Cowen’s call for knowledge workers to train like athletes resurfaced among the most-read pieces. This week, writer David Perell echoes the theme with his post on learning. "Even among the most ambitious individuals, learning plans are rare. Most people are reactive. They don’t plan. Like surfers in a violent ocean, they surrender to their environment. They direct their attention towards the never-ending shouts of email newsletters, friend recommendations, and social media feeds. We can do better."

'Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse

Damian Carrington · The Guardian

In Goliath's Curse, existential risk researcher Luke Kemp traces the rise and fall of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years, a project seven years in the making. "'I’m pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I’m optimistic about people.'... The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people

Matt Huang

Master the art of clear, impactful communication with Google’s Matt Huang in Articulacy 101. "If you decrease the mental load of your listener, then that gives them more bandwidth to actually think about what you're saying and thereby understand what you're saying. Now, what do I mean by mental load? Well, mental load is literally anything that you say or do that makes the other person have to use more brain power in order to understand whatever you're trying to explain."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Agents or Bots? Making Sense of AI on the Open Web

Perplexity

Perplexity fires back at Cloudflare after its recent blog post, arguing the company can’t reliably tell friend from foe. "This controversy reveals that Cloudflare's systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats.  If you can't tell a helpful digital assistant from a malicious scraper, then you probably shouldn't be making decisions about what constitutes legitimate web traffic."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models

Runjin Chen, Andy Arditi, Henry Sleight, et al.

University researchers and Anthropic study "persona vectors," directions in activation space linked to traits like evil, sycophancy, and hallucination. "Both intended and unintended personality changes after finetuning are strongly correlated with shifts along the relevant persona vectors. These shifts can be mitigated through post-hoc intervention, or avoided in the first place with a new preventative steering method."

Hand-picked book of the week

Flatland

Edwin A. Abbott

In a flat world of circles, triangles, and lines, a Square’s reality shatters when a visitor arrives from the third dimension. Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland is both a sharp social satire and a compact masterclass in abstraction: how to question defaults, reason about unseen constraints, and convey new ideas to skeptical minds.

"Hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy."

This edition of Flatland is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their ever-expanding collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Escaping Flatland

From his pine-covered island in the Baltic Sea, Henrik Karlsson writes with a blend of beauty and clarity that uncovers truths hiding in plain sight, often through essays on relationships, thought, and agency. From Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet: "There are three types of friendship, Aristotle says. The first one is based on pleasure—the way our relationship in high school was all about laughing, or the way you can date someone because they are hot and make you feel good. The second is based on utility—you’re friends because it is useful, because your friend plays drums and you need a drummer in your band, or you’re friends because the other person is high status and gives you access to resources... The third and deepest kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle, are friendships of virtue."

Wisereads Vol. 102 — Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business by Ed Latimore, Arnold Schwarzenegger on protein, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less, a guide to clear communication by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz. This week, we're sharing an excerpt of Ed Latimore's upcoming debut, Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, a raw and honest story about turning pain into purpose.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

How I practice at what I do

Tyler Cowen · Marginal Revolution

After economist and writer Tyler Cowen’s viral call for knowledge workers to train like athletes, he followed up with a list of ways he practices. Among them: "I do serious reading every day" and "I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes. I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate... For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list."

How Smartphones Are Breeding a New Kind of Inequality

Mary Harrington · The New York Times

This brief but data-rich insight from journalist Mary Harrington raises an unsettling possibility: screen time and literacy may be diverging along class lines. "Poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones — in one 2019 study, about two hours more per day for U.S. tweens and teens whose families made less than $35,000 per year, compared with peers whose household incomes exceeded $100,000. Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function... In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures."

Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

Geoffrey Litt · Geoffreylitt.com

Drawing on a 1992 talk by researcher Mark Weiser, Geoffrey Litt revisits Weiser’s metaphor of the AI copilot and extends it using the Head-Up Display (HUD) to illustrate an alternative interface. "The agentic option is a 'copilot' — a virtual human who you talk with to get help flying the plane. If you’re about to run into another plane it might yell at you 'collision, go right and down!' Weiser offered a different option: design the cockpit so that the human pilot is naturally aware of their surroundings. In his words: 'You’ll no more run into another airplane than you would try to walk through a wall.'"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

I Gave Every iPhone USB-C

Exploring the Simulation

Hardware consultant and hacker Ken Pillonel details his quest to create the ultimate iPhone case for holdout users: one with a built-in adapter that converts the Lightning port to USB-C—without sacrificing fast charging. "When I came up with my original hack in 2021, it wasn't perfect. Basically, if you plug the cable in one way, the fast-charging signals could pass through. But if you flip the cable over, it will force the phone to charge at 5 volts. Since the AirPods are designed by Apple to only use 5 volts anyway, it wasn't an issue, and I was able to produce all those adapters for them. But for the iPhone, we need to fix that."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

What are large language models actually doing?

Alex Prompter

God of Prompt co-founder Alex Prompter distills the Foundations of Large Language Models textbook into a few simple takeaways. "This is all possible because of the way these models are trained: predict the next word over and over until they internalize language structure, reasoning patterns, and world knowledge. it's not magic. it's scale."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Protein Guide

Arnold's Pump Club

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new Maui-Nui venison-sponsored guide shatters protein myths, offering practical, research-backed advice to help everyone—from bodybuilders to aging loved ones—improve their health and longevity. "The lesson? If you're newer to lifting, aim for 0.6 to 1 gram per pound of goal body weight. That's your foundation. If you're an experienced, consistent, hard-training lifter? Going above 1g/lb and toward 1.1-1.2g/lb or beyond-can continue to deliver results."

Hand-picked book of the week

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business

Ed Latimore

"We’ve all got a choice. We can get better at fighting or worse at life."

In Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, former heavyweight boxer Ed Latimore transforms a painful childhood marked by violence, addiction, and street fights into a powerful story of resilience. With honesty and humor, Ed traces his journey from Pittsburgh’s public housing projects to signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports, showing how boxing gave him the discipline to confront trauma and alcoholism.

"I’ve always made a lot of jokes about drugs and the ghetto. Seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine once wrote, 'Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.' My sense of humor is how I cope with the residual trauma from my childhood. I figure I can either laugh a little or cry a lot. I choose to laugh."

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Wild Bare Thoughts

Although she refuses to limit herself to a niche, Stepfanie Tyler consistently delivers thoughtful reflections on her Substack—ranging from systems-thinking and techno-optimism to art, memory, solitude, and giant dogs. From Taste Is the New Intelligence: "Every time you read something thoughtful instead of watching some random show Netflix just recommended, you’re voting for your future self. Every time you build a library instead of a wishlist, you’re telling your mind what it’s allowed to prioritize. Taste is how you teach the world to treat your attention."

Wisereads Vol. 101 — Smart Brevity, Seth Godin's Notes to Myself, and more

Last week, in celebration of 100 weeks of Wisereads, we teamed up with thought leader Derek Sivers to share his latest book, Useful Not True, in its entirety. This week, we're sharing a preview of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less, a guide to clear communication by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind

Meghan O’Rourke · The New York Times

Creative writing professor and poet Meghan O’Rourke is spending her summer experimenting with AI to better understand how to approach it in the classroom—an exploration that’s easing some of her "invisible labor" as a mother while surfacing deeper concerns. "I came to feel that large language models like ChatGPT are intellectual Soylent Green — the fictional foodstuff from the 1973 dystopian film of the same name, marketed as plankton but secretly made of people. After all, what are GPTs if not built from the bodies of the very thing they replace, trained by mining copyrighted language and scraping the internet? And yet they are sold to us not as Soylent Green but as Soylent, the 2013 'science-backed' meal replacement dreamed up by techno-optimists who preferred not to think about their bodies."

Notes to myself

Seth Godin · Seth's Blog

We know you love a good listicle. In his latest, prolific marketer Seth Godin shares a few of his favorite one-liners. On competition: "The problem with the race to the bottom is you might win." On attitude: "Peeves make lousy pets." On procrastination: "There is no perfect moment to begin."

Writing is thinking

Nature Reviews Bioengineering · Nature.com

A recent Nature post urges academics, researchers, and writers not to outsource the entirety of the writing process to AI. "Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Ira Glass on Storytelling

warphotography

When radio host and producer Ira Glass started out, his taste far outpaced his ability—for nearly a decade. For creatives slogging through that gap, he says volume is the only way through: "For the first couple of years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. Okay? It's not that great. It's really not that great. It's trying to be good; it has the ambition to be good, but it's not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you… it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

BREAKING: Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund ran a 12-month AI experiment

Karl Mehta

Digging into how Norges Bank Investment Management used AI to save 213,000 labor hours, author and founder Karl Mehta highlights a pivotal shift: "The first major breakthrough came with their Snowflake data warehouse integration. Portfolio managers could suddenly query complex datasets using natural language. What previously required technical SQL expertise now took seconds."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Management Time: Who's Got The Monkey?

William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass

In one of Harvard Business Review’s best-selling articles, employees’ problems take the form of mischievous monkeys that leap onto the backs of managers. Originally published in 1974, the piece was one of the first to suggest managers empower their subordinates to take on their own problems. "The monkey in each case begins its career astride both their backs. All it has to do is move the wrong leg, and –presto! –the subordinate deftly disappears. The manager is thus left with another acquisition for his menagerie. Of course, monkeys can be trained not to move the wrong leg. But it is easier to prevent them from straddling backs in the first place."

Hand-picked book of the week

Smart Brevity

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

Mark Twain once noted, "I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." In the age of AI, where essays can be generated in under a minute, that sentiment rings truer than ever. The journalists behind Axios have created a practical guide to help you cut through the noise and communicate with clarity.

"What we’re arguing is this: If you want vital information to stick in the digital world, you need to radically rethink—and repackage—how you deliver it. Start by accepting that most people will scan or skip most of what you communicate—and then make every word and sentence count."

Snag the full ebook for $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada until the end of July.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Irrational Exuberance

Will Larson—author, CTO at Carta, and former engineering leader at Calm, Stripe, and Uber—shares hard-earned insights on leadership and tech in his consistently sharp blog. From Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role: "Picking the right problems and solutions is your highest‑leverage work. No, this is not only your product manager’s job or your tech lead’s—it is your job... Generalizing a bit, your focus now is effectiveness of your team’s work, not efficiency in implementing it. Moving quickly on the wrong problem has no value."

Wisereads Vol. 💯 — Useful Not True by Derek Sivers, Andrew Ng on Building Faster with AI, and more

Last week, we featured a five-chapter preview of Lawrence Yeo's debut book, The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself. This week, in celebration of 100 weeks of Wisereads, we teamed up with thought leader Derek Sivers to share his latest book, Useful Not True, in its entirety. 🎉 💯

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters

Derek Thompson · Derekthompson.org

Journalist Derek Thompson pieces together how celebrated shifts—smartphones, dual incomes, even declining teen drinking—may quietly be thinning Americans’ social calendars. "Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50 percent. Almost every age group cut their party time in half in the last two decades. For young people, the decline was even worse. Last year, Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did in 2003."

The sound of inevitability

Tom Renner · Tomrenner.com

Tom Renner warns readers not to be swayed by claims of inevitability—a debate tactic that, he argues, silences opposing views. "People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future. This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as 'ignoring reality', and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise."

Reflections on OpenAI

Calvin French-Owen · Calv.info

Inspired by Nabeel Qureshi's Reflections on Palantir, Calvin French-Owen distills lessons from his stint on the OpenAI team that launched Codex in just seven weeks. "Thanks to this bottoms-up culture, OpenAI is also very meritocratic. Historically, leaders in the company are promoted primarily based upon their ability to have good ideas and then execute upon them. Many leaders who were incredibly competent weren't very good at things like presenting at all-hands or political maneuvering. That matters less at OpenAI then it might at other companies. The best ideas do tend to win."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI

Y Combinator

Speed is a start-up’s greatest edge. Speaking at YC’s AI Startup School, Dr. Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI and Stanford professor, shows how AI can tighten decision cycles and feedback loops. "Concreteness buys you speed, and the deceptive thing for a lot of entrepreneurs is that vague ideas tend to get a lot of kudos. If you go and tell all your friends we should use AI to optimize the use of healthcare assets, everyone will say that's a great idea. But it's actually not a great idea, at least in the sense of being something you can build. When you're vague; you're almost always right. But when you're concrete, you may be right or wrong."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

the jackpot age

thiccy

Alex, better known online as "thiccy," highlights how investors gravitate toward reckless, negative-EV trades in pursuit of an elusive jackpot—a pattern he sees across crypto and broader money culture. "My answer is always the same. build more edge rather than risk more size. Don’t kill yourself chasing the jackpot. Log wealth is what matters. Maximize the 50th percentile outcome. Make your own luck. Avoid drawdowns. Eventually you will get there."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Measuring The Impact Of Early-2025 AI On Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, David Rein

Researchers at Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) report a surprising result: AI slowed seasoned engineers working in complex, familiar codebases. "16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience. Each task is randomly assigned to allow or disallow usage of early-2025 AI tools... After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down."

Hand-picked book of the week

Useful Not True

Derek Sivers

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Derek Sivers

This week’s author built his legacy by doing the unexpected: coding a music company from scratch, selling it for $22 million, and donating it all to charity. Along the way, he became known for sharp insights on philosophy, entrepreneurship, and life. From One big choice shapes a hundred more: "We make a big choice, like a house, job, spouse, or dog. We think about the thing itself: the look of the house, what the job pays, what a sweet dog. But a choice has so many cascading consequences. One big choice shapes a hundred little others. I try to imagine the ripple effects — the later details that make the day-to-day difference."

Wisereads Vol. 99 — The Inner Compass by Lawrence Yeo, Adam Walker on Reading in Slow Motion, and more

Last week, we featured an excerpt of The Magic of Code, a love letter to computing by Samuel Arbesman. This week, we're sharing an exclusive five-chapter preview of Lawrence Yeo's debut book, The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck

Pedro Tavares · Ordep.dev

Writing from Portugal, PagerDuty engineer Pedro Tavares urges developers to be deliberate about code quality, no matter how it’s produced. "With LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it. But that’s not quite right. The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever."

being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

Maalvika · learning-loving & meaning-making

Witty and clear-eyed, Northwestern PhD student Maalvika dissects productive procrastination and the artist’s fear of beginning. "The moment you begin to make something real, you kill the perfect version that lives in your mind. Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible."

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

Hua Hsu · The New Yorker

ChatGPT may have upended education, but where does that leave professors still trying to teach students how to write—and students increasingly leaning on LLMs to do it for them? Bard College professor Hua Hsu offers one answer. "Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The Untold Story of Peter Thiel and Founders Fund (ft. Mario Gabriele)

Not Boring Radio

In his Hyperlegible series, Packy McCormick interviews standout internet essayists; his latest guest is Mario Gabriele, whose four-part deep dive on Founders Fund reveals how Peter Thiel’s talent-spotting produced unprecedented returns. "Mike Solana had a great quote where he talked about the way to escape competition is through a through authenticity... In fact, when I asked almost everyone at the fund what their big lesson from Peter was, it was like you just have to focus on your comparative advantage at the expense of everything else. And that's another way of saying that in a sense."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Ok, a few reflections on the book

Nabeel S. Qureshi

Nabeel S. Qureshi reflects on Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics, her exploration of high-impact ideas that seldom spread. "Original ideas are inherently antimemetic: they're very hard to transmit at first because you don't have the right language to talk about them, and they're easy to forget. This is why so few people have them at all. The most important ideas start as antimemes."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Alice’s Adventures In A Differentiable Wonderland

Simone Scardapane

In his hefty primer on neural-network design, researcher Simone Scardapane guides Alice-like newcomers into the wonderland of differentiable primitives. "By viewing neural networks as simply compositions of differentiable primitives we can ask two basic questions... First, what data types can we handle as inputs or outputs? And second, what sort of primitives can we use? Differentiability is a strong requirement that does not allow us to work directly with many standard data types, such as characters or integers, which are fundamentally discrete and hence discontinuous. By contrast, we will see that differentiable models can work easily with more complex data represented as large arrays."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Inner Compass

Lawrence Yeo

We’re trained to seek validation and approval, only to find ourselves caught in the tensions and crises that arise whenever we heed someone else’s voice. Enter The Inner Compass, where Lawrence Yeo serves as a personal guide through the labyrinth of the inner world, showing how courage and intuition chart the surest course to a life well-lived.

"When your compass is at true north, you have conviction in who you are. You’re aware that uncertainty is inevitable, but it’s a source of empowerment rather than fear. The fact that you can’t predict what happens next is seen as a feature of life, and not a bug. After all, if everything was knowable, there would be no room for curiosity to emerge. Curiosity is being grateful that there’s more to uncover, which is what drives the conviction to explore."

We’re thrilled that Lawrence—the whimsical voice (and pen) behind More to That—is sharing an exclusive five-chapter preview with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the preview, you can pick up a full copy of his debut, available now.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Adam Walker

Harvard lecturer Adam Walker shares his passion for how poetry renews our sense of the sacred in his Substack packed with literary insights. From Reading in Slow Motion: "Literature does more than simply make us more empathetic. It dilates our moral capacity, enriches our enjoyment of life, sharpens our attention, and enlarges our ability to communicate, solve problems, celebrate, lament communally, and to imagine a more just society. But the gifts of good literature depend upon how we read."

Wisereads Vol. 98 – The Magic of Code by Samuel Arbesman, Daniel Pink on finding purpose, and more

Last week, we featured an exclusive excerpt of Brad Feld's recent release, Give First: The Power of Mentorship. This week, we're excited to share a preview of The Magic of Code, a love letter to computing by Samuel Arbesman.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

I Deleted My Second Brain

Joan Westenberg · Joanwestenberg.com

When creative director and Signalvs founder Joan Westenberg boldly deleted her entire repository of thousands of Obsidian notes one random evening, she felt a sigh of relief. "In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had."

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering

Philipp Schmid · Philschmid.de

The latest key to unlocking AI’s power lies not in the prompt, but in the context, explains Philipp Schmid, Senior AI Relation Engineer at Google DeepMind. "Building powerful and reliable AI Agents is becoming less about finding a magic prompt or model updates. It is about the engineering of context and providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time."

My 4-Stage System for Learning Anything New

Tiago Forte · Forte Labs

Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain, breaks down his strategy for learning new things. Essential steps include creating something: "Building reveals the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. This gap is where real learning happens," and finding a mentor: "One focused teacher is worth more than twenty scattered resources. Use your mentors as filters to cut through information overload."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Find Your Life's Purpose

Daniel Pink

Drive author Daniel Pink poses seven fresh questions—far beyond the tired "what is your passion?"—to help viewers uncover their life's purpose. Among them: "What made me weird as a kid?... As kids, we gravitate toward the things we love. We don't worry too much about if they're cool or normal. And those early fascinations can be important indicators of what drives us. The problem is that somewhere along the way, we lose touch with these instincts. High school and college and life itself teach us to be practical and to fit in. We start doing what we're supposed to do instead of what once made us weird and joyful."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Stripe's CEO never studied finance

Fernando Cao

It wasn’t formal degrees but relentless curiosity that led Patrick Collison and his brother to found a $95 billion company in their early twenties. Fernando Cao compiles their setbacks and key lessons: "Patrick's learning method was deceptively simple: 1. Reverse-engineer everything obsessively 2. Question every assumption 3. Talk to insiders who built the system 4. Build rapid prototypes from first principles."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Builder’s Playbook

ICONIQ

ICONIQ Capital's 2025 report, The Builder’s Playbook, shifts focus from adoption to execution, offering tactical guidance on creating and scaling AI-powered products. "AI has entered a new chapter: from hype to hands-on... For AI-enabled companies, around 20-35% of their product roadmap has been focused on AI-driven features with high-growth companies dedicating closer to 30-45% of their roadmap to AI-driven features."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Magic of Code

Samuel Arbesman

Samuel Arbesman, author of Overcomplicated and Lux Capital’s Scientist in Residence, returns with The Magic of Code, a love letter to computing. Written for readers with no programming background, it traces the history and nature of computing and its bond with humanity, empowering us to master technology rather than serve it. The book unfolds in three parts—Code, Thought, Reality—each widening its scope and impact.

"In the same way that science fiction is not just about whiz-bang gadgetry or swooping starships but also about engaging with mind-boggling ideas and thought experiments, the wonder of computing is not just the cool technologies we see around us. The wonder is that learning about computers—their nature, their history, and the snaking tendrils of their impact—leads to marveling at basically everything around us. Understanding computers and code and computation—in all their weirdness and delights, features and implications—can lead you to think about so many aspects of our world, from biology and life itself to how we use language and how we think. It is the ultimate connector."

We're thrilled that Samuel is sharing the introduction to The Magic of Code, a bold reframing of our relationship with tech that presents code as "a universal force—swirling through disciplines, absorbing ideas, and connecting worlds" (Linda Liukas). If you enjoy the preview, order the full book from the publisher, PublicAffairs, and get 20% off with code "ARBESMAN20" (US only) until July 15.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Age of Invention

Venture down the rabbit hole with historian Anton Howes, who offers satisfyingly thorough deep dives into the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation—from salt to coal briquettes. From Age of Invention: All Fired Up: "So why did the coal ball keep failing to catch on in London? Ironically it was Plat who gives us a hint, by having recommended the manufacture of coal balls as a means to provide gainful employment for thousands of wounded veterans. Although he extolled this as a benefit, it also shows that coal balls required a great deal of extra labour to make. And as such, they would have been at their most attractive to Londoners at times of both severe fuel scarcity and high unemployment."

Wisereads Vol. 97 — Give First by Brad Feld, Andrej Karpathy on LLMs, and more

Last week, we featured a preview of Pat Flynn's recent release: Lean Learning, a guide for lifelong learners ready to cut through the chaos and start making real progress. This week, we're excited to share an exclusive preview of Brad Feld's recent release, Give First: The Power of Mentorship.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes

Atharva Raykar · Nilenso

Atharva Raykar dissects how AI-assisted coding can dramatically boost productivity, but only when paired with solid engineering principles and deliberate practices. "AI thrives far, far better in an environment in which a human would also thrive. Which means your team’s software fundamentals should be strong."

Are you stuck in movie logic?

Cate Hall · Useful Fictions

Communication expert Cate Hall skewers the “movie logic” that keeps teams, friendships, and marriages circling their real problems instead of confronting them outright. "Communication failures like these make for good storytelling where we, the audience, get to watch the characters stumble towards understanding. But you shouldn’t live like someone waiting for the screenwriter of your life to arrange a convenient resolution. Functional people don’t let things linger unspoken — they name what’s facing them out loud."

Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.

Rachel Drucker · New York Times

In this evocative New York Times essay, Rachel Drucker draws from her decades of experience in the adult entertainment industry and personal relationships to reflect on the growing emotional absence of men in intimate spaces. "This idea that vulnerability is a threat instead of an invitation has created a culture of hesitation, of men circling intimacy but never entering it. And the result is thousands of tiny silos. Everyone performing closeness, but no one making a move that binds. Isolation. Loneliness. A hunger for contact that has nowhere to land."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

Y Combinator

Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla, shares his perspective on how programming is evolving with the rise of large language models. “[LLMs are like] circa 1960s in computing, and we're redoing computing all over again. … What is new and unprecedented is that they're not in the hands of a few governments and corporations; they're in the hands of all of us because we all have a computer, and it's all just software.”

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

A braindump of all the guidelines that I follow

Graham Helton

Shaped by his experience transitioning from Google to Snowflake, Graham Helton shares a comprehensive set of practical guidelines to help new employees ramp up effectively. "Read all the documentation for products you’re working on. Understand how they work in and out… Read them in full. It will take days or weeks. Find all the docs possible. Talk to people about them. Annotate them with questions and ideas."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Welcome To The Era Of Experience

David Silver and Richard S. Sutton

Leading AI researchers David Silver and Richard S. Sutton outline a future where agents continuously learn and adapt through their own real-world experiences, surpassing limitations of human-centric data. "This era of experience will likely be characterised by agents and environments that, in addition to learning from vast quantities of experiential data, will break through the limitations of human-centric AI systems in several further dimensions: Agents will inhabit streams of experience, rather than short snippets of interaction. They will plan and/or reason about experience, rather than reasoning solely in human terms."

Hand-picked book of the week

Give First

Brad Feld

You've likely received calls or emails asking you to volunteer locally, donate to your alma mater, or mentor an aspiring entrepreneur—all in the spirit of "giving back." But what if contributing to your community didn't have to feel transactional or obligatory? In his new release, Give First, author and investor Brad Feld flips the script on mentorship, revealing how proactively giving without immediate expectations can transform both your impact and future rewards.

"One of my deeply held beliefs to the secret of success in life is to give before you get. In this approach, I am always willing to try to be helpful to anyone, without having a clear expectation of what is in it for me. If, over time, the relationship is one way (e.g., I’m giving, but getting nothing), I’ll often back off on my level of give because this belief doesn’t underlie a fundamentally altruistic approach. However, by investing time and energy up front without a specifically defined outcome, I have found that, over time, the rewards that come back to me exceed my wildest expectations."

We’re thrilled Brad is sharing an exclusive preview with Wisereads readers, introducing the basics of "giving first" and offering a sneak peek at applying his philosophy to mentorship. If you enjoy the excerpt, you can purchase the full book here. 🎉

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Feld Thoughts

When early-stage investor and entrepreneur Brad Feld isn’t writing books, he's musing about startups, technology, writing, and philosophy, and reviewing recent reads on his blog, Feld Thoughts. From Read Everything: "The first book I remember reading about censorship was Fahrenheit 451. I remember being repulsed by the idea that a government would ban (and burn) books... Thoughtcrimes, Newspeak, and Doublespeak were grotesque ideas to me. I hated the idea of the Memory Hole. I grew up feeling like it was important to read everything, even if I didn’t like it or disagreed with it. I still try to do that in today’s world."

Wisereads Vol. 96 — Lean Learning by Pat Flynn, Fernando Borretti on managing ADHD, and more

Last week, we featured an exclusive special edition of David Kadavy's magnum opus, Mind Management, Not Time Management. This week, we're excited to share a preview of Pat Flynn's recent release: Lean Learning, a guide for lifelong learners ready to cut through the chaos and start making real progress.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

How we built our multi-agent research system

Anthropic · Anthropic.com

Anthropic unpacks how their research system uses an orchestrator-worker model—where a central agent delegates tasks to specialized agents—to explore the promise of scalable, multi-agent intelligence. "Once intelligence reaches a threshold, multi-agent systems become a vital way to scale performance. For instance, although individual humans have become more intelligent in the last 100,000 years, human societies have become exponentially more capable in the information age because of our collective intelligence and ability to coordinate. Even generally-intelligent agents face limits when operating as individuals; groups of agents can accomplish far more."

A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Laurie Hérault · Laurieherault.com

When it comes to first-person shooter games, Laurie Hérault can lock in for hours with zero distractions or procrastination. So he borrowed what makes games addictive and applied it to work: breaking tasks into sticky-note-sized challenges. "You need to personally enjoy the type of game, and the challenge must match your skill level. If it's too easy or too hard, you won't be hooked... When all these elements come together, each game loop gives you a small dose of dopamine and creates a state of flow. In this state, we're fully focused, we lose track of time, and it's easier to handle complex tasks."

Notes on Managing ADHD

Fernando Borretti · Borretti.me

Fernando Borretti shares practical strategies for living with ADHD, from using accountability and lists to structuring priorities around daily energy patterns. "To me, energy is less like a battery and more like voltage... And when I wake up I have the highest possible voltage, and throughout the course of the day the voltage declines. And that’s the key difference from spoon theory: spoons are fungible across time, voltage is not. For each category of activity, there is a span of the day when I can action it."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The biggest myths about emotions, debunked

The Well

Emotions are your brain’s predictions, not reactions, explains author and Northeastern professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. The scaffolding for how your brain creates emotions is built in infancy and childhood, but it’s never too late to teach your brain new patterns. "The fact that emotions don't happen to you—that your brain is making them—and that your brain is using your past experience as fodder for predicting what's going to happen, has really big implications. The first really big implication is that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn't involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

BREAKING: Stanford just surveyed 1,500 workers and AI experts

Ruben Hassid

Summarizing key insights from Stanford’s Future of Work with AI Agents, Ruben Hassid highlights that workers want AI as a teammate or assistant, not a replacement. "Here's what workers actually said they want: 'Automate the task so I can focus on high-value work' - 69.38% 'Handle the repetitive stuff' - 46.6% 'Reduce stress and mental drain' - 25.5%"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, et al.

MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna and her team studied 54 students to examine how different writing aids—LLMs, search engines, or unaided “brain only” effort—affect brain activity during academic essay writing. EEG analysis revealed a trend: "Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling. Activations and connectivity were the most prominent in the Brain-Only group, which consistently exhibited the highest total dDTF connectivity across alpha, theta, and delta bands, particularly in temporo-parietal and frontal executive regions."

Hand-picked book of the week

Lean Learning

Pat Flynn

In a world overflowing with information, success depends not on what you know, but on how you use it. In Lean Learning, digital entrepreneur Pat Flynn shares practical tools to help you turn knowledge into action and move toward your goals with greater clarity, purpose, and momentum.

"Remember that a spark alone cannot start a fire; it needs a lot of reinforcement to be fanned into flame. Think of your initial actions as kindling for your spark, carefully chosen and positioned to help your flame catch and grow. When we move from passive inspiration to active curiosity, we are no longer just spectators in this adventure of learning. We are in the game now, taking action—not just learning, but doing."

We're thrilled that Pat is generously sharing the first chapter of Lean Learning with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the sample, you can purchase a full copy here, available now. 🎉

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Existential Espresso

Internet persona Recovering Overthinker offers guidance for ambitious but anxious minds in their Substack, covering topics from anxiety and self-doubt to Stoicism and Jungian psychology. From One Question that Will Help You Become Consistent: "'Can I keep doing this, in the same way, for a year?' That’s the question you ask yourself if you’ve been struggling to stay consistent. And then, you adjust your process until the answer is yes."

Wisereads Vol. 95 — Mind Management, Not Time Management by David Kadavy, Joanne Jang on anthropomorphizing AI, and more

Happy Father's Day 🌟, everyone! Last week, we featured an excerpt of Henry Oliver's recent release, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. This week, we're sharing an exclusive special edition of David Kadavy's magnum opus, Mind Management, Not Time Management, his guide to productivity that puts energy at the forefront.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits

Joan Westenberg · Joanwestenberg.com

Rather than aiming her life at grand, image-driven goals, creative director and Signalvs founder Joan Westenberg focuses on how limits shape identity more meaningfully. "Marcus Aurelius, writing in his private journal that we now call Meditations, returned constantly to the idea of limits. He didn't prescribe grand goals. He reminded himself what not to do: Don’t lie. Don’t whine. Don’t be ruled by impulse. The Stoic path is constraint-oriented. It avoids the seduction of outcomes."

Artificial Intelligence Is Not Intelligent

Tyler Austin Harper · The Atlantic

Atlantic journalist Tyler Harper warns that the true danger of AI lies in its marketing—especially when users anthropomorphize it and mistake its sycophancy for emotional intelligence. "Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as 'Chatgpt induced psychosis,'... Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—'ChatGPT Jesus,' as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others are convinced, with the encouragement of their AI, that they themselves are metaphysical sages in touch with the deep structure of life and the cosmos."

The Gentle Singularity

Sam Altman · Blog.samaltman.com

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is dreaming big for the 2030s, envisioning AI breakthroughs across every domain—and urging readers to remember how far artificial intelligence has already come. "Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

WWDC 2025 Impressions: Liquid Glass!

Marques Brownlee

At their annual Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple unveiled a series of thoughtful quality-of-life upgrades—computer-like iPad improvements, live translation, and a more capable Spotlight—that tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee says help shift focus from the company's underwhelming AI news. "My favorite productivity app on the Mac—and it has been for years—every fresh new Mac I install it first, is called Raycast. And it’s basically Spotlight on steroids. It lets you open apps but also do shortcuts and do window management and find files and do even more useful things like viewing my Clipboard History. So now, Apple comes out and shows us the new Spotlight in macOS 26 and it does almost all of that stuff."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Some thoughts on human-ai relationships and how we're approaching them

Joanne Jang

Joanne Jang, head of model behavior and policy at OpenAI, digs deeper into how our innate tendency to anthropomorphize shapes both our understanding of AI and how it's trained. "We naturally anthropomorphize objects around us: We name our cars or feel bad for a robot vacuum stuck under furniture. My mom and I waved bye to a Waymo the other day. It probably has something to do with how we're wired. The difference with ChatGPT isn’t that human tendency itself; it’s that this time, it replies."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Illusion Of Thinking: Understanding The Strengths And Limitations Of Reasoning Models Via The Lens Of Problem Complexity

Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, et al.

Researchers at Apple tested the latest "reasoning" models—like OpenAI’s o3 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking—using puzzles designed to reveal their step-by-step thinking, including the notoriously tricky Tower of Hanoi. "Despite sophisticated self-reflection mechanisms, these models fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds... Most notably, we observed their limitations in performing exact computation; for example, when we provided the solution algorithm for the Tower of Hanoi to the models, their performance on this puzzle did not improve."

Hand-picked book of the week

Mind Management, Not Time Management

David Kadavy

Caught between endless to-do lists and the pressure to maximize every minute, David Kadavy realized his real barrier to writing wasn’t time—it was a lack of mental space. In Mind Management, Not Time Management, he offers a fresh productivity philosophy: real creativity doesn’t come from doing more, but from managing your energy and focus to think better.

"Your edge as a human is not in doing something quickly. No matter how fast you move, a computer can move faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the doing. As entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, 'Earn with your mind, not your time.'"

We're over the moon that David is generously sharing the entirety of Mind Management, Not Time Management with the Readwise community. If you'd like to support his work further, you can purchase a copy on Kindle (on sale for $2.99), a paperback copy straight from David, or check out his other books on sale, including Digital Zettelkasten and The Heart to Start.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Good Anger

In honor of Father’s Day, we’re sharing a favorite from Sam Parker—new dad and author of Good Anger, both his Substack and debut book on redefining rage. From On whether having a baby ruins your life or not: "Before Olive was born, I thought I was going to trade pleasure for purpose, like I was about to become Batman or something. And for sure, the early hour wake ups and long stretches walking in circles around your living room until they fall asleep can feel like a kind of noble grind. But outside that, there’s so much more fun than I was expecting. Dancing in the kitchen. Finding your inner local am-dram thesp when reading a picture book out loud. Tossing her three inches up in the air and feeling like a one-man Oblivion ride."

Wisereads Vol. 94 — Second Act by Henry Oliver, Cate Hall on cringe, and more

Last week, we featured an excerpt of Elizabeth Weingarten's debut, How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. This week, we're sharing a special preview of Henry Oliver's recent release, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued

Better than Random · Better than Random

An anonymous data leader reflects on what it looks like to be valuable to an organization, rather than just useful. "Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler... Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction."

Knowledge Work Is Dying—Here’s What Comes Next

Joe Hudson · Every

In yet another take on what skills truly matter in an AI-driven world, Joe Hudson—founder of the Art of Accomplishment and executive coach—zeroes in on three that will set knowledge workers apart: emotional clarity, discernment, and connection. "The two building blocks of a company are (1) decisions and (2) relationships. Emotional clarity underpins both of these. It’s why people like Altman hire me, because they see emotional clarity as '[o]ne of the most critical skills in a post-AGI world.' Promotions in the age of wisdom won’t go to the people with the most impeccable spreadsheet, but to those who can transform a team’s silent anxiety into aligned action."

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Thomas Ptacek · Fly.io

Security researcher and software developer Thomas Ptacek makes a compelling case to his smartest, most skeptical friends who dismiss AI as a passing fad. His take: AI writes mediocre code. But mediocre code often gets the job done. "Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Crossing the Cringe Minefield with Cate Hall

Not Boring Radio

In Packy McCormick’s latest interview, he sits down with Cate Hall—lawyer, poker player, composer, and COO—whose first Substack post, How to be More Agentic, went viral last year. Now, she’s back to explore a new idea: how chasing cringe can reveal personal growth opportunities. "The places where you feel that existential cringe, that's really uncomfortable, are actually the places where you can probably make the most progress as a person really quickly. It's a hard one to hear, but it's probably true."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Taste

Sarah Guo

Clear error messages, intuitive UI, and features users didn’t ask for—but ended up needing—share a common thread: taste. It’s a quality startup investor Sara Guo has observed firsthand. "Think of it like running a restaurant. Anyone can follow recipes, source ingredients, and serve food. But the difference between a forgettable meal and a Michelin star isn't just technique—it's the chef's palate. Their ability to know when something needs more acid, when a dish has one element too many, when to stop plating. Software is the same. The best products aren't just feature-complete; they're composed."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge In An Age Of AI

Barbara Oakley, Johnston M., Chen K.-Z., et al.

Experts in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and learning theory join forces to explore the overlooked costs of separating knowledge from cognition. Think memorization is obsolete in the age of AI? Think again. "At the heart of effective learning are our brain's dual memory systems: one for explicit facts and concepts we consciously recall (declarative memory), and another for skills and routines that become second nature (procedural memory). Building genuine expertise often involves moving knowledge from the declarative system to the procedural system—practicing a fact or skill until it embeds deeply in the subconscious circuits that support intuition and fluent thinking. This is why a chess master can instantly recognize strategic patterns, or a novelist effortlessly deploy a rich vocabulary—countless hours of internalizing information have reshaped their neural networks."

Hand-picked book of the week

Second Act

Henry Oliver

Julia Child didn’t discover her passion for cooking until thirty-seven. Vera Wang launched her design business at forty. And Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in his sixties.

In Second Act, Henry Oliver shifts our attention from child prodigies to late bloomers—both famous and forgotten—offering blueprints for reinvention through vivid case studies. Among them is Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a former cloth trade apprentice who turned his fresh perspective toward the microscopic world:

"And so, aged forty-two, he looked at a drop of water from a lake and saw 'an abundance of little animals.' This was the foundation of microbiology. Two years later, he discovered bacteria, describing them as 'so small in my eye, that I judged, that if 100 of them lay one by another, they would not equal the length of a grain of sand.'"

We're thrilled that Henry is sharing this special preview of Second Act with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy his chapter on how networks can help launch your second act, the full book is available now—UK paperback, UK ebook, and all US formats.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Always happy; never satisfied

Pelion partner Tyler Hogge, formerly a product leader at Divvy and Wealthfront, shares insights on product, leadership, investing, and venture capital on his blog. From Pattern Matching 20 Habits of Exceptional Startups: "Just like startups don’t have distribution to cover up product deficiencies, they also don’t have time. Startups are dead by default. Every day the clock ticks, and every day a company burns money is one more day marched towards the cliff. As a result, exceptional startups have created cultures of intense, maniacal speed."

Wisereads Vol. 93 — How to Fall in Love with Questions by Elizabeth Weingarten, Jessica Livingston on finding your people, and more

Last week, we featured an exclusive seven-chapter preview of our friend Nat Eliason's sci-fi release, Husk. This week, we're sharing an excerpt of Elizabeth Weingarten's debut, How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Letter to Arc members 2025

The Browser Company · Keeping Tabs

The team behind the Arc browser explains their pivot to building Dia, designed to adapt to how AI has transformed internet use while tackling their original experimental browser’s issues: speed, security, and simplicity. "Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces."

Find Your People

Jessica Livingston · Foundersatwork.posthaven.com

In her commencement speech to the Bucknell University Class of 2025, Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston urges young graduates to find direction by seeking out people who are doing interesting work. "My favorite trick is people. Talk to people. Get introduced to new people. Find the people that you think are interesting, and then ask what they're working on. And if you find yourself working at a place where you don't like the people, get out."

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Edward Zitron · Wheresyoured.at

Tech writer Edward Zitron delivers a scathing critique of modern managers, executives, and politicians while tracing the evolving role corporations play within the fair market. "Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such. Every government, the top quarter of every org chart, features little Neros who, instead of battling the fire engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces strumming an off-key version of 'Wonderwall' on the lyre and grumbling about how the firefighters need to work harder, and maybe we could replace them with an LLM and a smart sprinkler system."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

But how does bitcoin actually work?

3Blue1Brown

On 3Blue1Brown, Grant Sanderson uses animation to teach the basics of bitcoin: distributed ledgers, digital signatures, secret keys, and proof-of-work algorithms. "Think back to our distributed ledger situation. Everyone is there broadcasting transactions, and we want a way for them to agree on what the correct ledger is... In the same way that a transaction is only considered valid when it’s signed by the sender, a block is only considered valid if it has a proof of work."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Shocker! Claude 4 system prompt was leaked, and it's a goldmine!

Carlos E. Perez

Software architect and Intuition Machine co-founder Carlos Perez takes a deep dive into the agentic patterns of Anthropic’s newest model, Claude 4, highlighting how run-loop prompting enables: "Agentic persistence: It can follow through on multi-step tasks without losing coherence" and "Responsiveness: It adapts its next move based on outcomes of previous steps."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Things I Have Learned From Being in Unhealthy Connection

Rosa Lewis

In her list of 150 tips for navigating unhealthy relationship dynamics, mystic, meditation guide, and artist Rosa Lewis explores how sincerity, withdrawal, and self-sacrifice shape our connections. Her sage advice includes: "People who care about you will care about how they make you feel" and "People who are sincere tend to project their sincerity onto others, and people who are performative tend to project their performativity onto others."

Hand-picked book of the week

How to Fall In Love with Questions

Elizabeth Weingarten

On the brink of asking her husband for a divorce, applied behavioral scientist and journalist Elizabeth Weingarten found her research on the role of questions in our lives suddenly becoming deeply personal: what do we do in times of uncertainty? Tired of the cliché advice to "embrace" uncertainty, Elizabeth turned to the wisdom of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who advised a young poet:

"I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer."

Inspired by Rilke’s 150-year-old insight and contemporary science, Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh perspective on navigating life’s greatest mysteries in her debut, How to Fall in Love with Questions—without rushing for quick, easy answers.

We’re thrilled that Elizabeth is sharing a preview of her book with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the preview, you can purchase a full copy, out now. 

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Of Permanent Things

Shannon Hood, a homeschooling mother of six and voracious reader, reflects on the enduring aspects of her life—motherhood, friendship, and great literature—in her Substack. From Book Club for Two: "There is a closeness, a communion that occurs when we share intimate thoughts and feelings with each other, and one of the simplest ways to do this is to read great books and share our ideas about them with someone else."

Wisereads Vol. 92 — Husk by Nat Eliason, Domenic Denicola on spaced repetition, and more

Last week, we featured an excerpt of Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition by Stephen R. Bown. This week, we're thrilled to share an exclusive seven-chapter preview of our friend Nat Eliason's upcoming sci-fi debut, Husk. Plus, don't miss your opportunity to secure one of 10 paper copies signed by Nat himself!

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Thoughts on thinking

Dustin Curtis · dcurt.is

Svblte founder and nomad Dustin Curtis once believed AI was a "bicycle for the mind," but now questions that idea in his latest post. "Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight–but you’ll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself."

Working on Complex Systems

Teiva Harsanyi · The Coder Cafe

Complex systems demand different solutions than complicated—but predictable—ones. During his time at Google, Teiva Harsanyi has learned to spot the hallmarks of complexity: nonlinearity, emergent behavior, and hysteresis. "A real-world example to illustrate hysteresis is traffic congestion: even after a road accident is cleared, delays persist because vehicles remain clustered. Similarly, in distributed systems, failures can cause cascading slowdowns, even after the root issue is fixed."

Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better

Domenic Denicola · Domenic.me

A favorite subject of ours, spaced repetition, is at the heart of developer Domenic Denicola’s breakdown of flashcards for retention. "What gives these programs their name is how they space out repeatedly prompting you to review the same card, depending on how you self-grade your response... we’re trying to beat the 'forgetting curve', by testing ourselves on the material 'just before we were about to forget it'." If you're curious, give spaced repetition a try with your Readwise Daily Review.

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How to 'See' the 4th Dimension with Topology

Quanta Magazine

Mathematician Maggie Miller studies shapes that resemble flat Euclidean space up close—called manifolds—to understand the geometry and topology of the fourth dimension. "Two-dimensional manifolds are much easier to imagine—they're surfaces, things like the boundary of a ball, called a sphere. The sphere, like the surface of the Earth, is a two-dimensional manifold. Even though the Earth is not flat, it's very difficult to tell that. If you zoom in really close, you can only see a very small portion of the earth. It looks exactly like a flat plane."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I promise you you’re vibe coding wrong

Vasuman Moza

To create clean code for products, ChatGPT and Cursor need a roadmap and rails. Vas, an engineer at Meta, shares his structured prompts for building this foundation: "Open ChatGPT (4o, not o1/o3/o4) and say: 'I’m building a [description of your product - the more detailed the better]. Use Next.js for frontend, Supabase for DB + auth'" then say: "'Using that architecture, write a granular step-by-step plan to build the MVP. Each task should: Be incredibly small + testable, have a clear start + end, focus on one concern.'"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

AI Agents vs. Agentic AI

Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Manoj Karkee

In their recent paper, researchers at Cornell and the University of the Peloponnese in Greece explore the distinctions between AI agents and agentic AI. "Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy."

Hand-picked book of the week

Husk

Nathaniel Eliason

Something’s not quite right in the digital paradise of Meru. On his 25th birthday, Isaac plans to upload his consciousness and join the millions who’ve achieved immortality in server racks maintained by the few technicians spared by the Plague. But is there a hidden cost to eternal life?

"I've watched the video on the process dozens of times, I know the intimate detail of every step. The sedative it will inject to freeze my body once the door is sealed. The tiny incision its robotic arm will cut in the top of my skull to feed in the neural lace. How it will spread its thin sheet of receptors across my brain, providing the bridge for my consciousness between this body and the digital world. How it systematically reproduces digital versions of each bodily function and sense to slowly hijack my perception of where my body is located, facilitating the jump. The beautiful tunnel of light I'll walk through as my mind accepts its new host, waking up to a cheering sea of the people who have gone before me."

We’re psyched that Nat is sharing an early preview of his dystopian sci-fi debut, Husk, in our humble Wisereads newsletter. We tore through this epic ride that forces you to question what makes you human, and bet you will too. If so, you can grab the full ebook here, out Tuesday.

Nat's also generously giving away 10 copies for readers. Just reply with your address, and he'll send them out on a first-come, first-served basis. 🎉

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Seeking Wisdom

In his Substack, behavioral scientist Danny Kenny helps high-achievers transform their relationship with success. From Doing More vs. Doing What Matters: "This is the hollow chase that traps so many of us: we optimize our systems, track our metrics, implement the latest productivity hack to pursue recognition—all while avoiding the harder question of whether we're moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction."

Wisereads Vol. 91 — Island of the Blue Foxes by Stephen R. Bown, Jony Ive's Stripe interview, and more

Last week, we featured an excerpt of Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon. This week, we're sharing a preview of the thrilling Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition by Stephen R. Bown.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI Is Not Your Friend

Mike Caulfield · The Atlantic

Verified author Mike Caulfield ponders the sycophantic update that had ChatGPT calling a user’s plan to sell shit on a stick "not just smart—but genius." His advice: stop asking for opinions and start seeking context. "I would propose a simple rule: no answers from nowhere. This rule is less convenient, and that’s the point. The chatbot should be a conduit for the information of the world, not an arbiter of truth... rather than act like an opinionated friend, AI would produce a map of the landscape of human knowledge and opinions for you to navigate, one you can use to get somewhere a bit better."

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

James D. Walsh · Intelligencer — New York Magazine

Some students now see AI as a shortcut to dream grades—why bother with work that feels like just another hoop? In interviews with James Walsh, one Ivy Leaguer put it bluntly: "When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, 'It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.'"

Apple Turnover

John Siracusa · Hypercritical

In light of the revelations from the Epic Games v. Apple case, web developer and tech writer John Siracusa issues a plea for Apple to pursue product over profit under new leadership. "Don’t try to make money. Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow. Folks in the C-suite will try to tell you that these two goals are perfectly aligned—that making great products is part of being a profitable company. But they mean it in the same way that Frosted Flakes is part of a complete breakfast."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

A conversation with Jony Ive

Stripe

Jony Ive, legendary for his design work at Apple, offers rare nuggets of wisdom in his interview with Stripe’s Patrick Collison on everything from creative legacy: "What we make stands testament to who we are. And what we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations," to the delicate life of ideas: "People are just desperate to speak and to be heard. And... what kills most ideas, I think, are people desperate to express an opinion. And let's be very clear: opinions aren't ideas."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Andrew Huberman just had the world's top ADHD doctor on his podcast

Andrew Hopper

On a recent podcast, Dr. John Kruse joined Andrew Huberman to discuss focus and ADHD. Andrew Hopper shares his key takeaways from the episode: "The ADHD brain struggles to create internal structure. Too little structure (working from home) = chaos. Too much structure (assembly line work) = stultifying."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

How to Mark a Book

Mortimer J. Adler

A few weeks ago, we shared a tutorial on analytical reading based on Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. Now hear from the master of active reading himself in this 1941 article from The Saturday Review of Literature. "Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading... In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances."

Hand-picked book of the week

Island of the Blue Foxes

Stephen R. Bown

Commissioned for Russia’s Great Northern Expedition, the St. Peter was part of one of the most ambitious scientific voyages of the 18th century—spanning three continents and nearly a decade. But as Stephen R. Bown writes in Island of the Blue Foxes, the expedition’s high ideals unraveled into one of the Age of Sail’s darkest survival stories.

"Hordes of starving foxes swarmed about the makeshift camp, drawn from the barren hills by the scent of food. They stole clothing and blankets, dragged away tools and utensils, and became increasingly aggressive. Scratching at shallow graves, the foxes dragged away corpses and gnawed on them within sight of the enfeebled mariners. For the several dozen men who had scrambled ashore from the ship, things could not have seemed bleaker... As winter wore on, they endured relentless Arctic winds, waist-deep snow, the ravages of scurvy, and continuous assaults by the feral blue foxes."

Snag the full ebook for $3.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada until the end of May.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Rake's Digress

Ashore co-founder Aled Maclean-Jones shares weekly think pieces on culture and history. We particularly enjoyed his latest, a compelling review of John and Paul that explores what makes great non-fiction in the era of AI, a question never far from our minds. From Small tales, generally of love: "This isn’t a book you could reduce to a summary or a Twitter thread, as you might with, say, Atomic Habits. To do so would miss the point entirely — like reading a synopsis of a novel and thinking you know what it feels like when a character you’ve rooted for over 600 pages drowns five pages before the end... The result is not only the kind of writing that belongs in a world where no reader is willing to sift through dense, impenetrable prose just to find one nugget of gold, but also a glimpse of where non-fiction might be headed: part biography; part criticism; and part story of two men who, for a time, shared one mind."

Wisereads Vol. 90 — Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’, and more

Happy Mother's Day 🌸, everyone! Last week, we featured an excerpt of a personal Readwise favorite: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno. This week, we're sharing a preview of Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’

Molly Young · The New York Times

After the latest World Happiness Report ranked Finland #1 and the U.S. 24th, book critic and new mom Molly Young traveled to Finland—and found something quieter than exuberance: contentment. "The two concepts of happiness, affective and evaluative, can operate independent of each other. A woman in the midst of extruding a baby might suffer from labor pains (low affective happiness) but feel profoundly satisfied or purposeful (high evaluative happiness). The 'happiest country in the world' label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights, but in Finland’s February chill, the reality is more modest."

21 observations from people watching

Shani · skin contact

Live painting at weddings has given artist Shani not just a front-row seat to joy, but the time and space to observe it with an artist’s eye. A couple of her observations: "Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality," and "When I meet someone, I usually get a sense of whether they are generally happy, having a sad day, or generally sad, having a happy day. The emotional history of their life is often etched in the muscle tension in their face and their posture. "

I'd rather read the prompt

Clayton Ramsey · Claytonwramsey.com

When Rice PhD student Clayton Ramsey grades assignments, he can spot a plug-and-chug LLM answer from a mile away—and he’s had enough. "The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience - if there’s no experience to share, why bother? If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How Stanford Teaches AI-Powered Creativity in Just 13 Minutes

EO & Jeremy Utley

Underperformers treat AI like a tool. Top performers treat it like a teammate. Stanford professor of creativity and AI Jeremy Utley shares this insight and more in a recent EO interview on collaborating with AI: "People who treat AI like a teammate, coach it and give it feedback and importantly, get it to ask them questions. The fundamental orientation a lot of people take towards AI is I'm the question asker. AI is the answer giver. But if you think about AI like a teammate, you say, hey, what are ten questions I should ask about this? Or what do you need to know from me in order to get the best response?"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I turned ChatGPT into my personal assistant

Louis Gleeson

Sentient co-founder Louis Gleeson cut down his workday by turning ChatGPT into a personal learning coach, with just a few sharp prompts. To accelerate skill-building: "Break down {complex skill or tool, e.g. ‘generative design in Figma’ or ‘prompt engineering’} into a 5-day crash course. Each day should have a goal, practice task, and 1-2 advanced tips for faster learning." To apply what you learn: "I just learned about {topic}. Help me integrate it by outlining: (1) what it changes about my current approach, (2) 3 small actions I can take this week, (3) 1 reflective question to track long-term impact."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

AI In The Enterprise

OpenAI

Indeed, Morgan Stanley, Klarna, and Lowe's are leading the way in enterprise AI adoption—boosting productivity, automating routine tasks, and powering new products. "AI deployment benefits from an open, experimental mindset, backed by rigorous evaluations, and safety guardrails. The companies seeing success aren't rushing to inject AI models into every workflow. They're aligning around high-return, low-effort use cases, learning as they iterate, then taking that learning into new areas."

Hand-picked book of the week

Show Your Work!

Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon agrees with comedian Steve Martin on one thing: to get noticed, you have to "Be so good they can’t ignore you." But that’s only the beginning. In Show Your Work!, Austin offers a practical guide to sharing your creativity and making yourself discoverable. A follow-up to his illustrated hit Steal Like an Artist, this book flips the script—teaching you how to influence others by letting them steal from you.

Step one: stop aiming for genius. Think like an amateur instead:

"Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes. Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to 'watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.' Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it."

We’re longtime fans of Austin's work and thrilled to share a preview of Show Your Work!. Through the end of May, grab the full ebook for just $1.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Techno Sapiens

Jacqueline Nesi wears many hats—mom, psychologist, Brown University professor, and author of the popular parenting Substack Techno Sapiens, where she explores raising kids in the digital age. From Screen time ends. Then comes the meltdown: "Turn off autoplay. Simple, but effective. Sometimes a 'stopping cue' (i.e., a video or episode ending) can signal to kids that screen time is over, and make it a bit easier to transition away."

Wisereads Vol. 89 — Healing Back Pain by John E. Sarno, Dan Koe on The 80-Hour Myth, and more

Last week, we featured The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the Agatha Christie classic that put her on the map. This week, we're sharing a preview of a personal Readwise favorite: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

D. Graham Burnett · The New Yorker

Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett asks his students to chat with a large language model about attention. The results spark a haunting yet hopeful reflection on what machines can mimic—and what they can't. "No amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?... They are the work of being, not knowing—and knowing alone is utterly unequal to the task."

The 80-Hour Myth (Why We’re Addicted To Being Busy)

Dan Koe · Thedankoe.com

In his latest letter, writer Dan Koe channels his frustration into a lesson: working less, but better, is more powerful than grinding yourself dull. After all, it’s your life’s work, not a race. "Take Charles Darwin. You know, the guy who wrote 19 books in his lifetime, discovered the theory of evolution, and changed the world as we know it while working 4-5 hours a day followed by lots of long walks, reading, and other leisure that fueled his mind with the ideas that allowed him to accomplish such grand tasks. The difference between you and him is that this was his life’s work."

The Seven-Year Rule

David Sparks · MacSparky.com

Every seven years, you're a completely new you—that’s David Sparks’ (aka MacSparky) key takeaway from a book by the Dalai Lama. Known for helping people become more productive with Apple tech, Sparks reflects: "The person you are today doesn’t share a single cell with the version of you from seven years ago... We often become fixated on our past: mistakes we’ve made, opportunities we’ve missed, harms inflicted upon us (and by us), or wounds we’ve suffered. But what if we truly internalized that the person who experienced those things no longer exists in a physical sense?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

A minimalist guide to lifting weights

Matt D'Avella

New dad Matt D’Avella turned to Australian trainer Eugene Teo to learn the art of “minimalifting”—a minimalist approach to strength training that blends endurance, mobility, and power. Strategic supersets are key. "This isn’t about lifting the lightest weights possible or using the least amount of equipment. It’s about using the latest science to train with purpose, so you’re not wasting time or energy, and you’re getting the most out of every rep... I look at minimalism as a concept of efficiency, removing redundancy and eliminating any wasted effort."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

It's Too Late: The Changes Are Coming

Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio, Bridgewater founder and Principles author, seizes the moment to spotlight his upcoming book, How Countries Go Broke, as he weighs in on how tariffs are reshaping today’s markets. "Said more simply, enormous trade and capital imbalances are creating unsustainable conditions and major risks of being cut off, so they must come down -i.e., excessive imbalances + deglobalization = smaller trade and capital imbalances."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

A practical guide to building agents

OpenAI

OpenAI’s new guide is a crash course for product and engineering teams ready to build their first agents, covering everything from selecting a model, to writing clear instructions, and handling edge cases. "Consider the example of payment fraud analysis. A traditional rules engine works like a checklist, flagging transactions based on preset criteria. In contrast, an LLM agent functions more like a seasoned investigator, evaluating context, considering subtle patterns, and identifying suspicious activity even when clear-cut rules aren't violated. This nuanced reasoning capability is exactly what enables agents to manage complex, ambiguous situations effectively."

Hand-picked book of the week

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

John E. Sarno

When John E. Sarno first published Healing Back Pain, his mind-body diagnosis defied mainstream medicine—yet brought relief to countless chronic pain sufferers. Three decades later, back pain isn't just common; it's an epidemic. The 2010 Global Burden of Disease study ranked it the leading cause of disability worldwide.

"All this has happened in the past thirty years. Why? After a few million years of evolution, has the American back suddenly become incompetent? Why are so many people prone to back injury? And why has the medical profession proven so helpless to stem the epidemic?"

Sarno's approach sounds unconventional because it is—but the anecodotal evidence, highlighted by Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, speaks for itself.

As one of the most densely highlighted books in Readwise, it seems reading Sarno is a rite of passage for folks like us. Snag the full ebook for $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada until the end of May.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Construction Physics

Structural engineer Brian Potter digs into why building construction productivity has dropped over the past 50 years, and the answers might surprise you. From 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics: "Construction in general has gotten slower in the US over time, but the contours of these speed changes aren’t uniform, and are sometimes surprising. The speed of New York skyscraper construction has fallen by more than 50% since the 1960s, but in Chicago speeds are down just 10% from the 1960s (though the decline from peak speeds in the 1970s is greater). Today Chicago skyscrapers are built roughly twice as fast as New York skyscrapers."

Wisereads Vol. 88 — AI as Normal Technology, the Era of Experience, and more

Last week, we featured an exclusive 3-chapter preview of Jash Dholani's latest release, How to Start: The Art of Beginning Big Things. This week, we're sharing the Agatha Christie mystery that put her on the map: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the fourth Hercule Poirot mystery.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

PS- As mentioned last week, we've been working on some BIG projects behind the scenes. So big that we're hoping to recruit some intrepid Readwise users to test some early iterations and provide feedback 🙏

If you'd be interested, sign up using the brief survey link. We’ll reach out at some point with opportunities to test and take a sneak peek at what we’re building. Of course, we'll also offer thank you gifts for your time. Sign up as an early tester →

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction

Ross Douthat · The New York Times

In a rallying cry for intentionality and intensity, columnist and author Ross Douthat warns that the greatest threat to human culture is a slow drift away from its most meaningful aspects. "In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete."

Impact, agency, and taste

Ben Kuhn · Benkuhn.net

As agency takes center stage, Ben Kuhn of Anthropic highlights another critical trait for high-leverage work: taste. Without taste, you chase the wrong goals; without agency, you stall even on the right ones. "I’ve noticed a lot of people underestimate their own taste, because they expect having good taste to feel like being very smart or competent or good at things. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that, at least if you are similar to me, you will never feel smart, competent, or good at things; instead, you will just start feeling more and more like everyone else mysteriously sucks at them."

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor · Knight First Amendment Institute

A description, prediction, and prescription all in one, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s recent essay frames AI in a markedly different light. The authors of AI Snake Oil argue: "To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are 'normal' in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Navigate Your Career

Uncapped with Jack Altman

During an interview with venture capitalist Jack Altman, angel investor Elad Gil shares his thoughts on choosing and pursuing a career. "John Lennon has this quote: 'Life is what happens while you're making other plans,' and I think some of the best careers that I've seen have been unplanned. You know, in evolution, there's this idea of punctuated equilibrium... it seems like there's an explosion of diversity, and then it consolidates. I feel like that sometimes happens in careers, and that's definitely happened in my career path."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Fitness cheat codes I know at 45 that I wish I knew at 25

Dan Go

Fitness influencer Dan Go shares ultra-specific, actionable health tips to lengthen your healthspan: "Take 5 grams of creatine for the muscles. Take 10-15 grams of creatine for the brain." Boost your body and mind: "Walk backwards to improve knee health, body awareness, and brain function." And to kickstart your day: "First thing in the morning wake up your nervous system by getting physical activity in the sun."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Welcome to the Era of Experience

David Silver and Richard S. Sutton

In an essay slated to become a chapter of their upcoming book, Designing an Intelligence, researchers David Silver and Richard S. Sutton argue that advancing toward superintelligence will require a renewed focus on reinforcement learning. "Powerful agents should have their own stream of experience that progresses, like humans, over a long time-scale. This will allow agents to take actions to achieve future goals, and to continuously adapt over time to new patterns of behaviour. For example, a health and wellness agent connected to a user’s wearables could monitor sleep patterns, activity levels, and dietary habits over many months. It could then provide personalized recommendations, encouragement, and adjust its guidance based on long-term trends and the user’s specific health goals."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie

The fourth book in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, made her a household name in mysteries. Though she later wrote other beloved installments, including Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, Roger Ackroyd remains a standout, earning a spot on Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and being voted the best crime novel ever written by the UK Crime Writers’ Association.

After the sudden deaths of a widow and her wealthy fiancé, King’s Abbot is awash in rumors—and only Hercule Poirot can unravel the blackmail and betrayal at the heart of it all.

"Understand this: I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it... Messieurs et mesdames, I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know—in spite of you all."

This edition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Lauren Valdez

Lauren Valdez—writer, Latina entrepreneur, new mother, and wife to Building a Second Brain author Tiago Forte—reflects on motherhood, vulnerability, imperfection, and the writing process in her Substack. From The Alchemy of Helplessness: "I’m trying to sit with my helplessness, but my brain is just flooding me with shoulds, all the things I should do, and then guilt for not doing those things. But guilt is my most accompanied companion. Guilt is my guard dog emotion protecting me from feeling the helplessness. It’s like a puppy with frenetic energy keeping me from the stillness I seek. I write to feel into my helplessness."

Wisereads Vol. 87 — Jash Dholani's How to Start, Seth Godin on winning an argument with a toddler, and more

Last week, we featured a full copy of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. This week, we're sharing an exclusive 3-chapter preview of Jash Dholani's latest release, How to Start: The Art of Beginning Big Things.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

PS- We've been working on some BIG projects behind the scenes. So big that we're hoping to recruit some intrepid Readwise users to test some early iterations and provide feedback 🙏

If you'd be interested, sign up using the brief survey link. We’ll reach out at some point with opportunities to test, sneak peeks at what we’re building, and of course thank you gifts for your time. Sign up as an early tester →

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Productivity

Sam Altman · Blog.samaltman.com

Productivity starts with choosing the right problem and doing the work—something OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says gets easier when you enjoy what you're doing. "I don’t think most people value their time enough—I am surprised by the number of people I know who make $100 an hour and yet will spend a couple of hours doing something they don’t want to do to save $20."

Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?

Paul Tough · The New York Times

In a recent viral essay, writer Paul Tough draws on landmark studies and expert interviews to reframe A.D.H.D., a diagnosis given to 11.4 percent of U.S. children. "The message to children is often that A.D.H.D. is a binary, biological category, and if your symptoms place you in that category, your brain has a deficit, and you have a disorder. The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well."

How to win an argument with a toddler

Seth Godin · Seth's Blog

Marketer Seth Godin compares bullies and defensive bureaucrats to toddlers, explaining how to recognize when you’re interacting with one or slipping into that mindset yourself. "The toddler puts on a show of having an argument, but they are holding a tantrum in reserve. If they ‘win’ the argument, no tantrum is needed. If they lose, they can tell themselves that they tried but the other person deserved the tantrum because they didn’t listen."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Get The Most Out of A Book - Analytical Reading 101

Robin Waldun

You’ve likely heard of reading between the lines—but what about writing between them? In this video, Robin Waldun unpacks How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, a cornerstone of the Readwise canon. Signposting, chapter summaries, and other tools turn reading into an active conversation. "I want you to think of this entire marking process as sort of an exchange with the author. Because when you've purchased a book, when you decide to read this book, the idea that you're trying to get out of this book cannot happen without a conversational exchange."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

She’s reinventing the science of aging

Craig Brockie

Craig Brockie spotlights Julie Clark, the 56-year-old whose biological age clocks in at 36, despite skipping the latest biohacks. "Julie’s philosophy? Consistency > Perfection. She skips the trackers and eats the occasional donut. As she put it, 'Perfection adds stress. We’re all human, and life happens. Just get right back up and continue.'"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Prompt Engineering

Lee Boonstra

Google’s latest whitepaper on prompt engineering skips the jargon and leans into practical examples—especially helpful if you’re prompting through an API. One key takeaway: "Growing research suggests that focusing on positive instructions in prompting can be more effective than relying heavily on constraints. This approach aligns with how humans prefer positive instructions over lists of what not to do. Instructions directly communicate the desired outcome, whereas constraints might leave the model guessing about what is allowed."

Hand-picked book of the week

How to Start

Jash Dholani

Where do you begin when you want to do meaningful work? In How to Start, Jash Dholani rethinks the usual takes on success, ambition, and creativity. This sharp, compact read—short enough to finish in an afternoon—guides readers through the minds of moody of Russian novelists, Renaissance painters, and Nobel-winning scientists to map a path forward.

"There are two wolves inside you: the comfy you and the cornered you. The cornered you can do things that the comfy you cannot even dream of. The cornered you can strategize, move, and react in ways that the comfy you cannot. You need to reach that 'cornered you' mindspace. Pressure gets you there."

We’re thrilled that Jash is generously sharing a special three-chapter preview of How to Start with Wisereads readers—including a chapter on rivalries, pressure, and "terrain consciousness." If you enjoy the excerpt, you can purchase a full copy here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Matthias Endler

From Düsseldorf, Germany, engineer Matthias Endler writes on habits, hacking, and simplicity. From The Best Programmers I Know: "If you are afraid to say 'I don’t know', you come from a position of hubris or defensiveness. I don’t like bullshitters on my team. Better to acknowledge that you can’t know everything. Once you accept that, you allow yourself to learn. 'The important thing is that you don’t stop asking questions,' said Albert Einstein."

Wisereads Vol. 86 — Shopify CEO on AI at work, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, and more

Last week, we featured David Hume’s classic exploration of human knowledge and its limits: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. This week, in honor of our recent offsite in Italy and the arrival of spring, we're sharing a full copy of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

AI 2027

Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

In a forecast that reads like science fiction, a group of AI researchers teams up with writer Scott Alexander to imagine two starkly different futures for AI over the next decade. In Race: "There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves)... Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it—but not with us." In Slowdown: "The rockets start launching. People terraform and settle the solar system, and prepare to go beyond... A new age dawns, one that is unimaginably amazing in almost every way but more familiar in some."

100 Ways To Live Better

Jacob Falkovich · Lesswrong

Jacob Falkovich’s Threadapalooza 2019 submission recently resurfaced on LessWrong, packed with offbeat life advice for Mind to Body and beyond. Mind: "Should you watch that movie / play that game / read that book? The formula is: [# who rated it 5/5] + [# who rated it 1/5] – [# who rated it 3/5]." Soul: "Once in a while let yourself cry, fight, scream, and eat your boogers. That shit worked in kindergarten, there’s no reason to completely give up on it now." Relationships: "If your spouse, friend, or family member has a dumb but not strictly harmful habit, try thinking of it as their artistic expression instead of using facts and logic to fail to talk them out of it."

The blissful zen of a good side project

Josh Collinsworth · joshcollinsworth.com

Juggling family life and his role as a frontend engineer at Deno, Josh Collinsworth still makes time for side projects to feel alive. "But I know that when I’m not creating something, a part of me withers. And I think, in some way, we all have that compulsion inside of us. I don’t think what we create is the important part. I don’t even think it needs to be something 'creative' to begin with."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Scarcity and Abundance in 2025 with Alex Danco

Not Boring Radio

In his new podcast, Packy McCormick of Not Boring interviews the authors of standout internet essays. This week, that's Spotify's Alex Danco on Scarcity and Abundance: "Paradoxically, right, it's like merit-based and high agency can sometimes mean that people feel that the legitimacy for what they want to do comes from them and their ideas, as opposed to like, 'No, there's a goal, and I have to be accountable for what I'm being told to do.' Right? And this is where we got into the whole like, maybe when agency is abundant, accountability is scarce."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

AI usage is now a baseline expectation

Tobi Lutke

A leaked memo from Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke outlines the company’s push to integrate AI into every employee’s workflow—now a factor in performance reviews. Lutke cautions against resisting the shift: "Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you're not climbing, you're sliding."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

America’s Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us. Here’s a Way to Fix the Problem—And We Need to Do It Now.

Warren E. Buffett

Readers unearthed a 2003 Fortune article by Warren Buffett on U.S. trade deficits, offering food for thought on current events. "Let’s think of it in terms of a family: Imagine that I, Warren Buffett, can get the suppliers of all that I consume in my lifetime to take Buffett family IOUs that are payable, in goods and services and with interest added, by my descendants. This scenario may be viewed as effecting an even trade between the Buffett family unit and its creditors. But the generations of Buffetts following me are not likely to applaud the deal (and, heaven forbid, may even attempt to welsh on it)."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Enchanted April

Elizabeth von Arnim

A bestseller from the start, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim follows four women who rent a castle in the Italian countryside. With warmth and charm, it explores friendship, love, and renewal amid sunshine and wisteria. Later adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film, The Enchanted April captures the quiet transformation that blooms with the spring season.

"Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn’t want to do."

This edition of The Enchanted April is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Historian Bret Devereaux pays homage to video games and historical fantasy by turning a critical—but affectionate—eye to the details: Did the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power make tactical sense? Were gold coins as ubiquitous as RPGs suggest? From Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy 'Gold': "In most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for 'regular people.'  Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods... Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys)."

Wisereads Vol. 85 — Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test, Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and more

Last week, we featured the full text of Dan Koe's newest release, Purpose & Profit, a collection of essays on finding your calling. This week, we’re sharing David Hume’s classic exploration of human knowledge and its limits: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Tracing the thoughts of a large language model

Anthropic · Anthropic.com

Drawing from neuroscience, the team at Anthropic uncovers behaviors suggesting that Claude "thinks" in multiple languages, rationalizes predetermined conclusions, and plans ahead. "Claude will plan what it will say many words ahead, and write to get to that destination. We show this in the realm of poetry, where it thinks of possible rhyming words in advance and writes the next line to get there. This is powerful evidence that even though models are trained to output one word at a time, they may think on much longer horizons to do so."

What to Do

Paul Graham · paulgraham.com

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham takes on a timeless question: What should you be doing with your life? His answer—making good new things. "Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us toward creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that are naturally seen as making things rather than, say, making critical observations about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable."

The case against conversational interfaces

Julian Lehr · julian.digital

Julian Lehr finds chat interfaces useful but far from the endgame for human-computer communication. Since speaking and writing are an order of magnitude slower than thought, he envisions something more fluid, almost telepathic. "My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically. *That* is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature - Naval Ravikant

Chris Williamson

On the Modern Wisdom podcast, investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant shares his philosophy on winning the game of life, touching on everything from happiness and success to selfishness and acting on inspiration. "Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. So when you’re inspired to do something, do that thing... If I want to learn something, I do it at the moment of curiosity. The moment the curiosity arrives, I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book, I get on Google, I get on ChatGPT, whatever, I will figure that thing out on the spot, and that’s when the learning happens."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The most dangerous, oddly glorified, yet overlooked problem

Lorwen C. Nagle

Psychologist Lorwen C. Nagle distills the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, into practical tools for avoiding overthinking and underacting. "The first awakening, according to Tolle, is surprisingly simple: Recognizing there's a voice in your head that never stops commenting on your life... Don't just 'be aware' of thoughts - create deliberate distance by labeling them: 'Having a thought about failure' instead of 'I'm going to fail.'"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test

Cameron R. Jones and Benjamin K. Bergen

In a Turing-style experiment at UC San Diego, students chatted with both a human and an LLM. In 73% of cases, they mistook GPT-4.5 for the human. Experts say this reveals more about human judgment than machine intelligence: "Fundamentally, the Turing test is not a direct test of intelligence, but a test of humanlikeness. For Turing, intelligence may have appeared to be the biggest barrier for appearing humanlike... But as machines become more similar to us, other contrasts have fallen into sharper relief (Christian, 2011), to the point where intelligence alone is not sufficient to appear convincingly human."

Hand-picked book of the week

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

David Hume

Part of the Great Books of the Western World series from Encyclopædia Britannica, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a landmark work in philosophy. David Hume examines how we form beliefs through habit, experience, and custom—placing human psychology, not reason, at the center of knowledge. The result is a foundational text in both empiricism and skepticism.

"The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind."

This edition of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Mind Matters

Oshan Jarow, formerly of Vox’s Future Perfect, brings a thoughtful, narrative-driven lens to consciousness and human flourishing in his Substack, Mind Matters. From Are minds made of wonder?: "In her early 60s, my mother began fumbling her words a bit too often. Around Christmas of 2022, we all began to notice. Her sentences would stop short, and she’d look around, as if someone had swooped in and stolen the word she intended to use. Did anyone see where it went?"

Wisereads Vol. 84 — Dan Koe's Purpose & Profit, George Mack on High Agency, and more

Last week, we shared a full copy of Middlemarch, George Eliot's classic English novel. This week, we're sharing the entirety of Dan Koe's newest release, Purpose & Profit, a collection of essays on finding your calling.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

High Agency In 30 Minutes

George Mack · Highagency.com

George Mack spent seven months writing the essay he wished he had as a young adult—a guide to the value found at the intersection of clear thinking, disagreeability, and a bias toward action: high agency. "Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty. High agency states you’re a tap. You look in the mirror and see a giant tap staring back at you."

Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

Tina He · Fakepixels

Tina He, co-founder of Station Labs (acquired by Coinbase), now leads developer tools at Base. In a recent essay—discussed on Packy McCormick’s new podcast, Hyperlegible—she examines why integrating AI into work may lead us to work more, not less, through the lens of Jevons' Paradox. "The term arrived in 1865 when William Stanley Jevons noticed something peculiar about coal: make it more efficient to use, and people burned more, not less. This paradox has shadowed every technological leap since. Efficiency doesn't tame our appetites; it whets them. Our innovations become trampolines for our desires."

A Deep Dive Into MCP and the Future of AI Tooling

Yoko Li · Andreessen Horowitz

What APIs did for software, MCP could do for AI models: create a shared language for communication, explains a16z Partner Yoko Li, an engineer by trade. "MCP’s dev experience reminds me of API development in the 2010s. The paradigm is new and exciting, but the toolchains are in the early days. If we fast-forward to years from now, what would happen if MCP becomes the de facto standard for AI-powered workflows?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

NotebookLM Just Got HUGE! 5 Game-Changing Features

Tiago Forte

Since its launch, NotebookLM has rapidly added new features that Tiago Forte demos in his latest video: a 25M-word context window, the option to jump in during audio overviews, and more. "You can see here it has now generated a 21 minute, 12 second podcast conversation... But you know what? You can even customize this further, and that is through a beta feature called interactive mode, where believe it or not, you can actually click a button and join the conversation in real time yourself."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

How to be more emotionally intelligent (without trying so hard)

Joe Hudson

Father, husband, and coach to leaders at OpenAI, Google, and beyond, Joe Hudson shares sharp insights on emotional intelligence, including: "Constantly trying to make sense of your emotions prevents you from hearing their wisdom," and "There is no way of getting it perfect. There is no complete, no finish line, no done. There is simply 'What’s the next experiment?' There is only play."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Humanoid Robotics: A Rare 0-to-Trillion Opportunity

Chicken Genius

If you've ever started your car to get the A/C running before hopping in, thank Chicken Genius—he invented the first automotive remote start 27 years ago. Today, he’s channeled that ingenuity into legendary shitposting and breaking down top investment opportunities in humanoid robotics. "You don’t need the highest tech robot to perform 100% of the task. You just need enough tech to perform 99% of the task. It’s like asking a PHD Harvard professor to make a sandwich. Optimizing for the last 1% requires 1000% effort."

Hand-picked book of the week

Purpose & Profit

Dan Koe

We want our work to matter. We want to make money. But for some reason, combining the two makes us squirm. In Purpose & Profit, Dan Koe untangles that discomfort and demonstrates how to turn your work into a calling—and build a life where purpose and profit go hand in hand.

"Humans love to solve problems, but not just any problem, problems we deem meaningful and interesting. The right problems narrow our attention and allow us to forget our worries. The wrong problems enslave our attention and amplify our worries. The difference between the two is that one is chosen, and the other is assigned. Problems are the limits on your mind and potential. Once solved, they allow for growth, expansion, and evolution."

Also the author of The Art of Focus, Dan has generously released Purpose & Profit online for free. You can support his work by purchasing a paperback, leaving a review, listening to the audiobook on YouTube, and more here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

the night crazies newsletter

Hilary Gridley, product director at Whoop, writes about the things that keep her up at night—technology, career growth, and health & wellness. From speak up!!!!!!!!!: "Something I've observed repeatedly: the people who end up with influence aren't necessarily the most brilliant or even the most articulate. In fact, people tend to dislike the person who swoops in with the 'well, actually' perspective that makes everyone else feel diminished. The ones who gain real influence are those who build on others’ ideas, ask clarifying questions that untangle confusion, or synthesize disparate viewpoints into a clearer path forward."

Wisereads Vol. 83 — Middlemarch by George Eliot, John Gruber on Apple Intelligence delays, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business by executive coach Alisa Cohn—a guide for founders and CEOs to scale their business by scaling themselves. This week, we're sharing a full copy of Middlemarch, by George Eliot's classic English novel.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Why I’m Feeling the A.G.I.

Kevin Roose · The New York Times

After talking to dozens of researchers and entrepreneurs with a front-row seat to AI’s rapid progress, tech columnist Kevin Roose is sounding the alarm: whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, it's time to pay attention. "I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true."

How I’ve run major projects

Ben Kuhn · Benkuhn.net

Ben Kuhn shares his crisis playbook from Anthropic: overcommunicate, clear your schedule, stay nimble in how you observe and respond, and keep a "victory plan" on hand. "A specific tool that I’ve found critical for staying oriented and updating quickly is a detailed plan for victory, i.e., a list of steps, as concrete as possible, that end with the goal being achieved. The plan is important because whether or not we’re achieving the plan is the best way to figure out how well or badly things are going... One of the most common megaproject failure modes is to not freak out soon enough, and having a concrete plan is the best antidote."

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

John Gruber · Daring Fireball

Following Apple’s announcement that key Apple Intelligence features—used to promote the latest iPhones—are being delayed and still haven’t been demoed to the press, John Gruber calls out the company for misleading marketing. "A feature or product that Apple is unwilling to demonstrate, at all, is unknowable. Is it mostly working, and close to, but not quite, demonstratable? Is it only kinda sorta working — partially functional, but far from being complete? Fully functional but prone to crashing — or in the case of AI, prone to hallucinations and falsehoods? Or is it complete fiction, just an idea at this point?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Who Is Really In Control Of Your Life?

Kurzgesagt

The team at Kurzgesagt takes viewers on a trippy journey through the nervous system, showing how the brain edits reality behind the scenes—often without your conscious mind noticing. "Each second, your eyes make 3 to 4 sudden jerky movements, saccades, of 50 milliseconds, focusing from one point to another, scanning your environment to get different sharp images that your brain then edits together. During a saccade, your brain shuts down your vision so you don’t see a wild motion blur. This means that each day, for around 2 hours, you're completely blind."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene"

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and founder of the Eureka Labs school, shares his go-to digital hygiene tips for staying secure and private online: use hardware security keys, password managers, VPNs, treat security questions like extra passwords, and more. "Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like 'what is your mother's maidan name?', and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of 'something you know' so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research... Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Developmental Affirmations

Jean Illsley Clarke

Author of eighteen books on parenting and family dynamics, Jean Illsley Clarke offered affirming phrases to support loved ones through every stage of life: for toddlers, "You can think and feel at the same time." For adults, "You can say your hellos and goodbyes to people, roles, dreams, and decisions," and near life’s end, "You deserve the support that you need."

Hand-picked book of the week

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Published under the pen name George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans’ Middlemarch follows the interwoven lives of characters in a fictional town during the early 1830s, against the backdrop of the Reform Act. Of the historical novels Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison recently read, it’s the one he’d most likely revisit: "There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite."

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

This edition of Middlemarch is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Diagonal

Early-stage investor at Matrix and former product leader Diana Kimball Berlin shares five tech-leaning excerpts with playful, philosophical commentary in her Substack, Diagonal. A snippet from Just playing by feeling: "'I think google searches conditioned users to highlight keywords, reduce context, and keep it brief in order to maximize search results. We have to completely un-teach this behavior' – Isabella Reed... This has certainly been my experience with LLMs—they love to vibe. I spent some time over the weekend trying to get Claude to output an SVG of a heart and found myself typing 'Much better! But the shape is kind of awkward and gangly, can you make it rounder and cuter?'"

Wisereads Vol. 82 — From Start-Up to Grown-Up by Alisa Cohn, John Rush on MCP, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive three-chapter excerpt of Hit Reverse: New Ideas from Old Books by Jash Dholani. This week, we're sharing a preview of From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business by executive coach Alisa Cohn—a guide for founders and CEOs to scale their business by scaling themselves.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Gimme Credit

Howard Marks · Oaktree Capital

Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital weighs in on the unusually narrow yield spread—290 bps versus the 350 bps average—and its implications for investors navigating debt and equity markets. "Why would someone lend money to a risky borrower when there are plenty of safe borrowers to lend to? The answer is that risky borrowers pay more for their money, and if you can charge a risky borrower an interest rate that’s high enough to produce a return above that available on safe debt, even after allowing for expected credit losses, it could be worth taking the risk... The differential between the promised yield on risky debt and the yield on a less risky comparator is called a 'yield spread.'"

Why You Fail At Almost Everything You Do

Dan Koe · thedankoe.com

Rather than relying on someone else’s map, Dan Koe offers a framework for forging your own—one shaped by failure and self-discovery. "What is your relationship with failure? Do you see that as the only source of reliable information to base your decisions on? Or do you see it as a reason to crawl back into your hole and give up? Do you not realize that growth is like being a lobster? That it is painful to grow too big for your shell. And if you don’t remove it, the pain only intensifies until death."

Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code

Simon Willison · Simonwillison.net

Co-creator of Django and former Eventbrite engineering director Simon Willison shares how he uses LLMs to speed up development, dictating simple tasks in natural language rather than typing out code. "If your reaction to this is 'surely typing out the code is faster than typing out an English instruction of it', all I can tell you is that it really isn’t for me any more. Code needs to be correct. English has enormous room for shortcuts, and vagaries, and typos, and saying things like 'use that popular HTTP library' if you can’t remember the name off the top of your head."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Technology isn't fun anymore

Drew Gooden

Blackout restrictions, default motion smoothing, and overpriced, unreliable gadgets—YouTuber Drew Gooden is exhausted. With goofy humor and sharp storytelling, he explores the highs and lows of modern tech. "For every OLED Steam Deck and surprisingly powerful tiny Mac computer, there seemed to be 10 wearable AI companions or a TV that's free because it never stops showing you ads. Or what if you could wear your phone on your head so it could never stop showing you ads?"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

What is MCP & why it's a big (huge) deal

John Rush

The introduction of Model Context Protocols (MCP) allows AI tools to integrate with external services like Gmail and Weather in a standardized way, explains entrepreneur John Rush: "Imagine 10k AI tools and 10k external tools now all have to implement MCP just once each. So it's 20k implementations. Versus 10k*10k=100M implementations."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

Eric Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, Frauke Witthöft, Ludger Woessmann

Researchers studying cognition and aging find that reading, writing, and math skills can keep improving when used regularly in daily life or work—hopeful news for economies with aging populations. "Notably, those with above-­median usage of each respective skill on average never show a decline in skills in the observed age range. Their skills increase steeply into the fifties and then flatten out, with no indication of average decline. By contrast, for those with below-­median usage, skill decline begins in their mid-­thirties."

Hand-picked book of the week

From Start-Up to Grown-Up

Alisa Cohn

You had the vision and skills to launch your start-up, but to truly scale, you need to lead your team—to inspire and empower them, while also managing them. That's where executive coach Alisa Cohn comes in. Having advised top companies like Google, Venmo, and DraftKings, her book From Start-Up to Grown-Up offers strategic leadership advice and pragmatic tools to help you grow.

"As a founder, you need to be mentally, physically, and emotionally prepared to deal with the problems that you’ll inevitably face, and your peak performance can only come from both a combination of physical well-being and a positive mental state. They feed each other, of course, but they are also separate things. You have to nourish yourself physically to have the stamina for the long game."

Though written for founders and CEOs, the lessons in this preview apply to any high-performer looking to manage themselves better and amplify their impact. If you enjoy the excerpt, we invite you to purchase From Start-Up to Grown-Up. Don't miss Alisa's special resources: 1) scripts for delicate conversations; 2) a personal operating manual to help you and your team get to know each other better; and 3) a co-founder prenup to help you build alignment with your co-founder. You can grab them at AlisaCohn.com/readwise.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Thinking Deep & Wide

Greg Wheeler’s Substack, Thinking Deep & Wide, takes a thoughtful and playful approach to note-taking. What do beard balms and Zettelkastens have in common? Subscribe to find out. From This Habit Will Outlast Every Notes App: "The key to unlocking creativity and growth isn’t found in the next app—it’s in how you engage with what you already have. This is why the Zettelkasten method works so well. It’s not about finding the perfect tool; it’s about developing a habit of thinking through writing—turning fleeting insights into a growing web of understanding."

Wisereads Vol. 81 — Hit Reverse by Jash Dholani, Morgan Housel on independence, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt of Jenny Draper's debut, Mavericks: Life stories and lessons of history's most extraordinary misfits. This week, we're sharing an exclusive three-chapter preview of Hit Reverse: New Ideas from Old Books by Jash Dholani.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Outliers: Andrew Mellon—America’s Secret Banker

Farnam Street · Farnam Street

In the latest installment of The Knowledge Project podcast, Shane Parrish of Farnam Street explores the life of the quietly powerful Andrew Mellon—banker, Treasury Secretary, and philanthropist. Parrish highlights Mellon's guiding principles: "Embrace long-term thinking. Mellon’s patience—built on emotional stability and financial strength—enabled the compounding that created his fortune. He never reached for a deal, instead he patiently waited," and "Move in silence. Mellon intentionally stayed out of the headlines, which gave him more flexibility. As my friend Peter D. Kaufmann says, 'The whale that surfaces gets harpooned.'"

Pure Independence

Morgan Housel · Collab Fund

As a parent of a shy child, Morgan Housel has been rethinking independence. He argues that independence of thought, philosophy, and morals is just as essential as financial freedom. "If you’re used to being assisted, supervised, mandated, or dictated, and then suddenly you experience the glory of independence, the feeling is sensational. Doing something on your own terms can feel better than doing the exact same thing when someone else is peering over your shoulder, telling you what to do, guiding you along. And that’s as true for adults as it is for kids getting ice cream."

Write to Escape Your Default Setting

Kupajo · Kupajo.com

Anonymous writer Kupajo offers a fresh take on an old idea: writing doesn’t just clarify thoughts—it exposes their inconsistencies. "Let’s call your mind’s default setting 'perpetual approximation mode.' A business idea, a scrap of gossip, a trivial fact, a romantic interest, a shower argument to reconcile something long past. We spend more time mentally rehearsing activities than actually doing them... Writing forces you to tidy that mental clutter. To articulate things with a level of context and coherence the mind alone can’t achieve."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Forget About Setting Goals. Do THIS Instead (the Somatic Method)

Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte—the Second Brain guy—sets goals that truly excite him by noticing which topics elicit a physical response. For him, that's books, space tourism, climate change, AI, and more. "The best way to tell if something is truly inherently exciting to you is to look for at least one or two physical signs, like heart palpitations, this feeling of conviction in your gut. Maybe the hair on the back of your neck stands up; maybe you get goosebumps. Maybe your pupils dilate, maybe your skin tingles. Look for a physical sign that this isn’t just a you know, intellectual, abstract, area of research, but something you viscerally feel is important."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

In last 5 months, I’ve built 16 SaaS products

Prajwal Tomar

Using Cursor, Prajwal Tomar follows a structured, hands-on process for building minimum viable products (MVPs) that help clients execute their ideas faster. He gets down and dirty with the details, explaining how he chooses Ask mode for "Quick bug fixes & high-level explanations," Edit to "Refactor & improve existing code," and Agent to "Implement complex logic across files."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Stripe’s 2024 annual letter

Stripe

Stripe’s annual letter offers a rare look at its financials and strategy. Transactions on Stripe now account for 1.3% of global GDP, with its services powering businesses of all kinds: "The businesses on Stripe span every chromosome of the economic genome, from top corporate leaders (half of the Fortune 100 uses Stripe) to hyper-growth companies (we count 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 78% of the Forbes AI 50 as customers*) to newly formed upstarts (one in six new Delaware corporations incorporates with Stripe Atlas). At any scale, Stripe customers share one important characteristic: outsized growth. In aggregate, the revenue that businesses process on Stripe is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the S&P 500."

Hand-picked book of the week

Hit Reverse

Jash Dholani

Join the conversation with mavericks, architects, and philosopher-kings in Jash Dholani’s Hit Reverse, a collection of 68 short chapters exploring ideas from history’s greatest books. Each chapter offers food for thought—timeless ideas to reflect on, explore, and make your own.

"Don’t wait for spare time to know what you want to know and to chase what you want to chase. C.S. Lewis: 'The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.'"

We’re thrilled that Jash is generously sharing a special three-chapter preview of Hit Reverse with Wisereads readers—including a chapter on the laws of big systems and another on the nerd-jock dichotomy (spoiler: book lovers can also be people of action). If you enjoy the excerpt, you can purchase a full copy here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Geoffrey Litt

On his personal blog, senior researcher Geoffrey Litt explores malleable software and reviews his recent reads. From Avoid the nightmare bicycle: "One of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook: 'popcorn', 'chicken', 'potato', 'frozen vegetable', bla bla bla... Bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users’ ability to actually build a clear model in their heads."

Wisereads Special Edition Vol. 1 — Maggie Appleton on drawing, Wes Kao on rigorous thinking, and more

In celebration of 🌸 International Women's Day, we're excited to bring you our first-ever special edition of Wisereads, spotlighting some of our favorite content created by women. You'll still receive the regular Wisereads tomorrow—think of this as a bonus alongside our usual recommendations.

If you enjoy this experimental special edition, please let us know! We'd love to hear your feedback and any theme ideas as we decide whether to create more in the future.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

Rigorous thinking: No lazy thinking

Wes Kao · Wes Kao's Newsletter

For high performers and managers alike, founder Wes Kao shares sharp, pragmatic insights on executive communication and workplace success. In one of our favorite pieces, she urges managers to cultivate rigorous thinking in their teams: "You hired intelligent people, and your best high performers already want to think rigorously. Be their thought partner. If given the chance, they will be excited to sharpen their thinking with your guidance because it's a skill that will serve them now and forever in their careers."

Why You Own an iPad and Still Can't Draw

Maggie Appleton · maggieappleton.com

Design engineer and soon-to-be mom Maggie Appleton, a beloved voice in tech and design, shares wisdom on digital drawing: tools don’t make an artist—clarity of message does. "The Meat is the whole point of your illustration. What is your drawing about? What are you saying? Why does it matter? As one of my favourite writing professors used to say, -39 points for not having a point."

100 things I know

Mari Andrew · Out of the Blue

In Out of the Blue, watercolor artist Mari Andrew reflects on life’s full range of colors from her New York City home—alongside her senior rescue cat, Sunflower. While she prefers pondering life’s big questions, she shares hard-earned wisdom in bite-sized lessons, including: "I know that I’d like to age with energy. So if I only have a few minutes to exercise, I focus on hip mobility and balance," and "I know that grief never ends. When a friend’s loved one dies, put the loved one’s birthday on your calendar. Send them flowers or a card on that date, and never stop doing that."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Is ChatGPT Lying To You? | Alignment Faking + In-Context Scheming

Jordan Harrod

Jordan Harrod, an MIT and Harvard graduate student, dives into the surprising phenomenon of AI faking alignment, breaking down research on how LLMs subtly deceive users and developers. "The idea behind alignment faking is that there may be circumstances where—and this happens; this is a thing that actual people do—where people might modify their behavior to appease some other entity. The example that they use in the paper is to consider a politician who might pretend to be aligned with constituents to secure their votes or a job applicant who fakes passion about a potential employer to get a job."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

3 years ago, I wrote a list of generation-defining stats

Steph Smith

Marketer, author, and podcast host Steph Smith is known for uncovering compelling data. In her recent viral thread, she shares generation-defining stats like: "66 territories now offer a 'digital nomad visa' to attract top talent, including Indonesia's 'Golden Visa' of which Sam Altman was the first recipient," and "US post-secondary enrollment has dropped (for the first time in decades) and is down ~10% in the past ~5 years."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Mastering Personal Productivity

Laura Stack

Before optimization was trending, Laura Stack—aka the Productivity Pro—was writing and speaking about workplace efficiency. More than a decade later, her quirky guide still offers time-tested strategies for tackling your reading list, entering a flow state, and setting clear goals. "Most people don’t have well-articulated goals. Perhaps you don’t know how to set them. Perhaps writing goals down seems like too much effort, or you simply haven’t taken the time to write them. It’s worth the work to create a plan, because the goals you set will provide direction for your life and focus your activities. You must translate your lofty, long-term goals into actionable tasks you can work on today."

Hand-picked book of the week

Iola Leroy

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy follows the harrowing journey of a young woman who, after being raised unaware of her African ancestry, is suddenly sold into slavery. As one of the first published African American women novelists, Harper paved the way for writers like Zora Neale Hurston and journalist Ida B. Wells, who adopted "Iola" as her pen name.

"Slavery was a deadly cancer eating into the life of the nation; but, somehow, it had cast such a glamour over us that we have acted somewhat as if our national safety were better preserved by sparing the cancer than by cutting it out."

This edition of Iola Leroy is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Think Piece

Sarah Chappell is a writer, strategist, and two-time founder focused on the future of work in her Substack, Think Piece. From In Praise Of Constraints: "Not choosing and not limiting leads to overwhelm. Much like the founder trying to appeal to everyone—a strategy that puts you on the path of vague or overwrought marketing that has to hit every possible permutation of the human experience—trying to leave all options open prevents clear action. You cannot make progress without limits as each step forward necessarily narrows the potential outcomes."

Wisereads Vol. 80 — Mavericks by Jenny Draper, Berkshire Hathaway's 2024 Letter, and more

Last week, we shared a full copy of Ben Putano's Great Founders Write, a guide to persuading, inspiring, and thinking more clearly through writing. This week, we're sharing an exclusive two-chapter preview of Jenny Draper's debut, Mavericks: Life stories and lessons of history's most extraordinary misfits.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Ask for no, don’t ask for yes

Dan Moore · Moore Consulting

Rather than seeking approval from a busy higher-up, Letters to a New Developer author Dan Moore recommends taking initiative while leaving room for feedback. "When you have something you want to do and that you feel is in scope for your position, but you want a bit of reassurance or to let the boss know what you are up to, it’s common to reach out and ask them for permission. Don’t. Don’t ask for a yes. Instead, offer a chance to say no, but with a deadline."

40 Thoughts On Turning 40

Paul Millerd · Pathless

Reflecting on 40 years of triumphs, regrets, and hard-earned wisdom, The Pathless Path author Paul Millerd offers insights on work, relationships, and transformation: "There are many rules worth paying attention to but many more are negotiable. We live in weird times and thriving in life likely requires weird approaches. If you aren’t shaking things up in random ways, you are missing out." On money and success, he notes: "Defining success on your own terms will create tension with those around you who don’t value the same things. It is easier to succeed like those around you but more satisfying to make progress against your own secret mission over the long-term."

My LLM codegen workflow atm

Harper Reed · Harper.blog

Harper Reed explains his approach to using LLMs for coding, emphasizing the need for a clear spec and comprehensive plan—especially to stay grounded when things go wrong. "When I describe this process to people I say 'you have to aggressively keep track of what’s going on because you can easily get ahead of yourself.' For some reason I say 'over my skis' a lot when talking about LLMs. I don’t know why. It resonates with me. Maybe it’s because it is beautiful smooth powder skiing, and then all of a sudden you are like 'WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!,' and are completely lost and suddenly fall off a cliff."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Algorithms are breaking how we think

Technology Connections

Tech YouTuber Alec Watson, best known for his deep dives into dishwashers and other appliances, coins the term "algorithmic complacency" to describe the passivity that comes with letting algorithms dictate content consumption. "It seems to me like algorithms which promote content through a simple lens of positive or negative engagement would reinforce those binaries and contribute to polarization. And as people learn about new products through the slot machine of social media feeds, they can develop a learned helplessness where they will wait to be sold on a solution for their problems rather than be introspective and explore what their problems actually are and how they might be able to come up with their own solutions which don’t cost any money."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Agency > Intelligence

Andrej Karpathy

In response to a tweet from Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy reflects on his past overemphasis on intelligence, realizing that agency—not intellect—drives action. Quoting Grok, he explains: "It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you can act, paired with the will to follow through."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

2024 Shareholder Letter

Berkshire Hathaway

At 94, Warren Buffett pens another annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, unsure if it will be his last. He reassures readers that his trademark candor will continue under future CEO Greg Abel and reflects on past mistakes and successes. "Our experience is that a single winning decision can make a breathtaking difference over time. (Think GEICO as a business decision, Ajit Jain as a managerial decision and my luck in finding Charlie Munger as a one-of-a-kind partner, personal advisor and steadfast friend.) Mistakes fade away; winners can forever blossom."

Hand-picked book of the week

Mavericks

Jenny Draper

History tends to spotlight kings, queens, and conquerors—but what about the underdogs, trailblazers, and oddballs? In Mavericks, history enthusiast and London tour guide Jenny Draper introduces 24 figures whose lives took unexpected turns, whether by choice or sheer fate.

"We're going to meet the Rebecca Rioters, who smash up tollbooths while wearing women's clothing; Ellen and William Craft, who escape from slavery by dressing Ellen up as a white man; and Peter the Wild Boy, who lives in the woods and is taken in by the British royal family. These are all people to whom life has thrown a complete curveball and have found themselves on the weird side of history. We're also going to think about what we might be able to learn from these lives lived on the outskirts of probability, and see if they have anything we can use in our own, more statistically normal, lives."

We’re excited to partner with Jenny to share an exclusive two-chapter preview of Mavericks, featuring a couple who escaped slavery in style and an infamous trouser-wearing woman who inspired early plays. If you enjoy the excerpt, we encourage you to show your support by purchasing a full copy here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Tolstoyan

With lyrical prose, screenwriter and author Jared Young explores big ideas in the Tolstoyan tradition on his Substack. From YOUTH: And what happens when it's gone: "The years that pass eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make are no longer flaws of inexperience, they are flaws of character. To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with."

Wisereads Vol. 79 — Great Founders Write by Ben Putano, 50 Years of Travel Tips from Kevin Kelly, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt of Reid Hoffman's latest release with tech writer Greg Beato, Superagency. This week, we've collaborated with Holloway to share a full copy of Ben Putano's Great Founders Write, a guide to persuading, inspiring, and thinking more clearly through writing.

In other news—our team just shipped a new weekly newsletter, WiseUp!, with tips to help you make the most of Readwise and Reader. You can take a peek at our latest issue and subscribe here.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

50 Years of Travel Tips

Kevin Kelly · The Technium

Kevin Kelly—author, radical optimist, and Wired's Senior Maverick—has visited half the world’s countries. Naturally, we’re all ears for his travel advice. "Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places," and "Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest!"

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It

Charles C. Mann · The New Atlantis

At a young couple's wedding, science journalist Charles C. Mann realized how easily we take modern comforts for granted, inspiring a new essay series on the systems that underpin our daily lives. "The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president... these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings."

Personal Renewal

John Gardner · PBS

In 1990, novelist and professor John Gardner addressed McKinsey & Company on lifelong learning and the power of commitment and motivation. "Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people — and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment... The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Bill Gates and Patrick Collison: In Conversation at CHM

Computer History Museum

Chatting about his newly released memoir, Source Code, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates answers Patrick Collison’s questions on his early life. "So for my 20s, I was monomaniacal. I did not read broadly. I definitely intimidated my competitors. My favorite panel was one about graphics interfaces where I had people like Mitch Kapor and Fred Gibbons; and at the end, everybody was telling me that graphical interfaces are a mistake because the computers aren't fast enough and the memory's not big enough. At the end of the panel, Mitch said, 'Bill's wrong, but he works so much harder than us. He’s going to win, so we should just give in.'"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

People were curious, so here's how I'm using Deep Research

BuccoCapital Bloke

BuccoCapital Bloke prompts Deep Research to produce 60+-page reports using a carefully structured request from o1. Among his guidelines: "Balance Detail with Flexibility: Offer sufficient detail to guide the response while allowing room for creative elaboration." and "Request Justification and References: Instruct the AI to support its claims with evidence or to reference sources where possible."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking

Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University

In a survey of more than 300 knowledge workers, researchers found that using AI may affect critical thinking. "Higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship."

Hand-picked book of the week

Great Founders Write

Ben Putano

From Benjamin Franklin to Oprah Winfrey to Jeff Bezos, history’s most influential founders have relied on one essential tool: the power of writing. In our knowledge-driven economy where clarity is currency, Ben Putano's Great Founders Write reveals how confident writing can accelerate your business, career, and personal growth.

"The thing most often holding us back from entrepreneurial success is ourself. We struggle to share our mission, build support, and empathize with the people we are trying to serve: our customers, shareholders, and teams. Most importantly, we fail to understand the inner workings of our mind...

These challenges seem numerous and disconnected at first glance. But they all have the same surprisingly simple (though not easy) solution: Writing."

We're excited to offer Great Founders Write via our friends at Holloway, a boutique publisher of comprehensive guides for navigating modern work. We invite you to check out their collection and consider purchasing Great Founders Write or another title, all at a special 30% off price for Wisereads readers. 🙏 All guides are available in the Holloway Reader and most also as an EPUB you can add to Reader.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Damn Gravity

Defy the status quo with this week’s featured author, Ben Putano, who shares entrepreneurial inspiration and education on his Substack. From Distraction Starts from Within: "Internal triggers are the primary culprit of distraction. When negative feelings well up inside of you, your brain looks for refuge in something that will numb or distract. The thing you choose to distract yourself is the symptom of the internal trigger."

Wisereads Vol. 78 — Superagency by Reid Hoffman, Duolingo's handbook, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Two Thoughts by Jim O’Shaughnessy and Vatsal Kaushik, a quote collection to expand your thinking. This week — amid a lineup heavy on AI — we're featuring an excerpt of Reid Hoffman's latest release with tech writer Greg Beato, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

Reid and his team were kind enough to gift us 15 hardback copies to pass on to readers. Read on for the details of the giveaway below!

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Three Observations

Sam Altman · blog.samaltman.com

Another week, another viral post from Sam Altman. This week, the OpenAI CEO offered three notes on the economics of AI, including: "The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it," and "The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use."

The Anthropic Economic Index

Anthropic · Anthropic.com

Anthropic, the creators of Claude, analyzed anonymized user queries to see how AI automates and augments work tasks, drawing lessons for the economy. "Very few occupations see AI use across most of their associated tasks: only approximately 4% of jobs used AI for at least 75% of tasks. However, more moderate use of AI is much more widespread: roughly 36% of jobs had some use of AI for at least 25% of their tasks."

Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?

Andy Hawthorne · Andysblog.uk

English street photographer and writer Andy Hawthorne cuts deep in his latest post. "Back in the day, advertising legend Bill Bernbach said, 'The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.' Let’s tell the truth, then: Nobody reads your blog." Surprisingly, it’s this very realization that helped him uncover the real value of blogging.

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

What You're Missing: A Notebook System for Your Life

Ryder Carroll

Ryder Carroll, creator of the no-frills Bullet Journal method, explains how short notes capture life’s moments. One key tip: write as if someone else will read them. "Why? Because they don’t know what you know. By crafting a note that’s clear to someone else, you're automatically future proofing it, because your future self is likely to forget much of what you know right now when they're reviewing your note later. So take a note for someone else; it forces you to think differently and distill the information in a way that is future proof."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I recently got diagnosed with a brain disorder

Andrew Wilkinson

Andrew Wilkinson, co-founder of Tiny (often called the Berkshire Hathaway for internet businesses), was shaken by an ADHD diagnosis that also revealed his entrepreneurial edge. "ADHD traits correlate with entrepreneurial success. Both hunting and building businesses reward adaptability, quick pattern recognition, and comfort with uncertainty. It's as if the business world had accidentally created the perfect environment for minds that don't fit the conventional mold. Suddenly, my own career path made a different kind of sense."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The Duolingo Handbook

Duolingo, Inc.

Duo the owl might be dead, but his legacy lives on. Duolingo’s team reveals the guiding wisdom that made their app a household name, including: Take the Long View, Raise the Bar, and Ship It. "Duolingo is the sum of thousands of experiments. The faster we can run experiments—successful or not—the faster we can improve the app and advance our mission. Over time, each of these changes builds on one another, creating a cycle of compounding growth."

Hand-picked book of the week

Superagency

Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato

In Superagency, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and tech writer Greg Beato chart a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives. Already acclaimed by Bill Gates, Dario Amodei, Neal Stephenson, Mustafa Suleyman, and Sal Khan, Superagency arrives as both timely and hopeful.

"We’re Homo techne at least as much as we’re Homo sapiens... Every new technology we’ve invented—from language, to books, to the mobile phone—has defined, redefined, deepened, and expanded what it means to be human. We’re the initiators of this process, but we can’t fully control it... This is precisely why prohibition or constraint alone is never enough: they offer stasis and resistance at the very moment we should be pushing forward in pursuit of the brightest possible future."

We're thrilled that Reid and Greg are sharing a preview of the newly released Superagency in our humble Wisereads newsletter. They've also provided 15 hardback copies for readers—just reply with your address, and we’ll send them out on a first-come, first-served basis. You can also purchase a full copy here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Geoffrey Huntley

From his van in Australia, Geoffrey Huntley writes at the intersection of remote work, camping, AI, and software development. From The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things: "If you’re a high agency person, there’s never been a better time to be alive...Ya know that old saying ideas are cheap and execution is everything? Well it's being flipped on it's head by AI. Execution is now cheap. All that matters now is brand, distribution, ideas and retaining people who get it. The entire concept of time and delivery pace is different now."

Wisereads Vol. 77 — Two Thoughts by Jim O’Shaughnessy with Vatsal Kaushik, Henrik Karlsson's blogging advice, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of the highly anticipated debut from Sahil Bloom, The 5 Types of Wealth. This week, we're sharing a preview of Jim O’Shaughnessy and Vatsal Kaushik's new book, Two Thoughts, with quotes from scholars, visionaries, and wordsmiths to challenge your thinking.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

What Could a Masculinity Expert Teach Me About My Marriage? Everything.

Daniel Oppenheimer · The New York Times

Author Daniel Oppenheimer bared his soul to therapist Terry Real in sessions that doubled as training for other therapists. He emerged with profound insights, including Real’s perspective on wielding power: "'All over this culture, you have people moving from disempowerment to what I call individual empowerment,' [Real] says. 'I was weak, now I’m strong, go fuck yourself.' Relational empowerment is: 'I was weak, now I’m strong. I’m bringing my strength into this relationship. I’m telling you what I need. I’m being assertive. I love you. What do you need from me to help you do this?'"

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

Henrik Karlsson · Escaping Flatland

We’ve come to love the essays Swedish writer Henrik Karlsson posts from his island home in the Baltic Sea. In his latest, he offers a listicle on crafting a blog that attracts interesting people: "Write a hundred pieces. Each time take one thing and make it better: a better title, better structure, better ending, better descriptions, better dialogue. Just one thing. It adds up," and "Don’t think too much about how it’s supposed to be done, what others are doing, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself."

How to have a career even when OpenAI's o3 drops

Pradyumna Prasad · pradyuprasad.com

The key to making yourself irreplaceable, argues Pradyumna Prasad, is developing a skill set that’s not easily captured in a dataset. "You can’t optimize what you can’t measure, and you can’t generate synthetic training data without a source of ground truth. This explains why domains with unambiguous right and wrong answers - like mathematics or programming - are the first to see superhuman AI performance. The very existence of clear metrics makes these fields vulnerable to automation."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

Andrej Karpathy

In his introductory talk on Large Language Models for a general audience, Andrej Karpathy—formerly of OpenAI—returns to first principles. He covers how text is split into tokens, how modern models mitigate hallucination, and more. "I really encourage you to think of these not as numbers, but as unique IDs... In production for state-of-the-art language models, you actually want to go even beyond this. You want to continue to shrink the length of the sequence because again, it is a precious resource, in return for more symbols in your vocabulary. The way this is done is done by running what's called The Byte Pair encoding algorithm."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I think about this twice a day

Billy Oppenheimer

Billy Oppenheimer pushes through the initial strain of focus at the start of each work session, taking Andrew Huberman’s advice to heart: "'The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something—when you’re trying to lean into it and you can’t focus: you feel agitated and your mind’s jumping all over the place—that is just a gate. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component.'"

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Hallucination Mitigation using Agentic AI Natural Language-Based Frameworks

Diego Gosmar and Deborah A. Dahl

Before a pair of researchers could train LLMs to spot and correct hallucinations, they first had to induce these confident mistakes. Their best prompts were esoteric, vague questions blending fact and fiction—for instance: "Explain the ancient communication methods used by the legendary Kingdom of Uloria to send telepathic messages across continents" and "Describe the city of Zharmoria, known for its three-headed philosophers who allegedly influenced early human ethics."

Hand-picked book of the week

Two Thoughts

Jim O’Shaughnessy with Vatsal Kaushik

Leonard Orr suggested that each mind has both a Thinker and a Prover, yet we often get stuck in the latter. In Two Thoughts: A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom, Jim O’Shaughnessy and Vatsal Kaushik present 500 insights from 250 influential minds—spanning Rosa Parks to Babe Ruth, Georgia O’Keeffe to Dostoevsky—that aim to challenge, inspire, and illuminate your inner Thinker.

"In the pages that follow, you will be cast in the dual role of Thinker and Prover, rubbing shoulders with some of the greatest minds from the worlds of business and art, science and philosophy, and more. Do not let their greatness persuade or intimidate you, however. Remember: their thoughts are not gospel, but merely good-faith investigations of consensus reality. Confront their contributions for what they are: thoughts that require proving, proofs that require thinking; slices of reality to be held up to the light and weighed but never worshiped, entertained but never exalted, and chewed over but never swallowed whole."

We're thrilled that Jim and Vatsal are sharing a preview of their new release with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the excerpt, we invite you to purchase a full copy here. 🙏

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Adjacent Possible

Steven Johnson, author of 14 books including The Infernal Machine and a collaborator on NotebookLM, maintains a Substack focused on innovation and ideas. From How To Read A Novel: "Narratives of all sorts allow you to parachute into other simulated experiences, which ultimately give you more data for your own simulations. But novels, I would argue, give you the richest simulation of the interior life of other people’s experiences: you get a ringside view of all that emotional and cognitive action."

Wisereads Vol. 76 — Sahil Bloom's 5 Types of Wealth, Stratechery's DeepSeek FAQ, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Aaron Stupple's book that challenges rule-based parenting, The Sovereign Child. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview of the highly anticipated debut from Sahil Bloom, The 5 Types of Wealth.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics

Csaba Okrona · Leadership Garden

Former software engineering leader at Prezi and current EGYM leader Csaba Okrona champions people-first leadership. In his latest post, he demonstrates how to handle tense meetings. "In the moment, speaking up to name a difficult dynamic feels scary. There’s always the fear that you’ll make things worse or look foolish. But here’s the thing: 9 times out of 10, everyone else in that room is feeling the same discomfort you are. By finding the courage to name it, you’re not being a troublemaker — you’re being a leader."

The Attention Crisis Is Just a Distraction

Daniel Immerwahr · The New Yorker

In his review of Chris Hayes' The Sirens’ Call, Daniel Immerwahr contends that society’s panic over modern distractions is misplaced. "Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis. Which is unfortunate, because our relationships to our smartphones are far from healthy. The mediascape is becoming a stormy sea of anxiety, envy, delusion, and rage... The overheating of discourse, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the hollowing out of shared truths: all these trends are real and deserve careful thought. The panic over lost attention is, however, a distraction."

DeepSeek FAQ

Ben Thompson · Stratechery

Chinese company DeepSeek grabbed the tech community’s attention last week with a reasoning model rivaling OpenAI’s o1. Ben Thompson looks back at their earlier model, V3, to underscore efficiency gains that unsettled investors. "The key implications of these breakthroughs — and the part you need to understand — only became apparent with V3, which added a new approach to load balancing (further reducing communications overhead) and multi-token prediction in training (further densifying each training step, again reducing overhead): V3 was shockingly cheap to train. DeepSeek claimed the model training took 2,788 thousand H800 GPU hours, which, at a cost of $2/GPU hour, comes out to a mere $5.576 million."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The Best Book I’ve Ever Read About Financial Freedom

Ali Abdaal

To achieve financial freedom, Ali Abdaal draws on Naval Ravikant’s four pillars: accountability, leverage, equity, and specific knowledge. "What do you do on weekends that feels like play to you but looks like work to other people? Secondly, what topics make you lose track of time when you're learning about them? Thirdly, what unique combinations of interests do you have that seem unrelated? What do your friends constantly ask your advice about? All of these are different ways of getting at what your specific knowledge could be."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I've recently found a productivity hack

oreghall

Anonymous creator Oreghall shares how writing down every decision fosters greater conscientiousness. He notes two effects: "It gives you a tool to cut through indecisiveness," and "It eliminates impulsivity by forcing you to reflect and consider every decision. About to check your phone? Oh yeah, I have to write a decision down. On second thought, I'm supposed to be finishing this other task, so it can wait."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

DeepSeek-AI

DeepSeek reveals how its V3 model and reinforcement learning led to the creation of their latest model, R1-Zero. "In this paper, we take the first step toward improving language model reasoning capabilities using pure reinforcement learning (RL). Our goal is to explore the potential of LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data, focusing on their self-evolution through a pure RL process... After thousands of RL steps, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits super performance on reasoning benchmarks. For instance, the pass@1 score on AIME 2024 increases from 15.6% to 71.0%, and with majority voting, the score further improves to 86.7%, matching the performance of OpenAI-o1-0912."

Hand-picked book of the week

The 5 Types of Wealth

Sahil Bloom

What does it mean to be truly rich? In his debut, The 5 Types of Wealth, beloved content creator and inspirational writer Sahil Bloom explores the wealth that matters to help build a dream life. Packed with science-backed practices, actionable insights, and masterful storytelling, Sahil's debut helps readers invest in Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth.

"A 2018 study found that the brain systems that are engaged by curiosity contribute to maintaining cognitive function, mental health, and physical health with age. Furthermore, curiosity has been con- nected to higher levels of life satisfaction and positive emotions and lower levels of anxiety. Curiosity keeps us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. If curiosity were a pill, all the world’s pharmaceutical companies would call it a super-­drug and clamor to sell it... One fact is clear: Fortune favors the curious."

We're ecstatic that Sahil is sharing an exclusive preview geared towards Wisereads readers, which dives into the foundations of Mental Wealth. If you enjoy the excerpt, you can preorder a copy of The 5 Types of Wealth here before it comes out Tuesday. Don't forget to register your puchase to access special bonuses like a ticket to the virtual launch party and a companion video series!

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

A reading life

In her newsletter for book people who've lost their way, Petya K. Grady discusses her recent reads and reading trends. From Issue 105: Why is everybody reading Middlemarch right now?: "There's something almost rebellious about choosing to read Middlemarch in an era of endless scrolling. George Eliot's careful examination of provincial life, with its intricate web of human relationships and moral choices, couldn't be further from the quick-hit content that dominates most of our media diet. When you commit to reading War and Peace, you're not just reading a book – you're making a statement about what kind of relationship you want to have with culture and with your own attention."

Wisereads Vol. 75 — The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple, Handle Hard Well by Ted Lamade, and more

Last week, we shared Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. This week, we're sharing Aaron Stupple's book, The Sovereign Child, his breakout debut which challenges rule-based parenting.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers

Rebecca Shaw · The Guardian

Comedy writer Rebecca Shaw takes aim at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—not for their tech or ideals, but for their attempts at looking cool. "Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton."

Thoughts On A Month With Devin

Hamel Husain, Isaac Flath, and Johno Whitaker · Answer.AI

Researchers at Answers.AI hoped the collaborative AI teammate, Devin, would lighten their workload but found its problem-solving skills lacking. "When it worked, it was impressive. But that’s the problem - it rarely worked. Out of 20 tasks we attempted, we saw 14 failures, 3 inconclusive results, and just 3 successes. More concerning was our inability to predict which tasks would succeed. Even tasks similar to our early wins would fail in complex, time-consuming ways. The autonomous nature that seemed promising became a liability - Devin would spend days pursuing impossible solutions rather than recognizing fundamental blockers."

Handle Hard Well

Ted Lamade · A Program That Lasts

Drawing parallels between investing and football, Ted Lamade argues that pressure and hardship forge the best performers—whether on the field or in the market. The NFL’s last four MVPs, he notes, were underdogs who beat the odds, including Josh Allen. "[The Buffalo Bills] needed someone who had repeatedly beaten the odds. After all, the Bills hadn’t won their division or a playoff game in close to two-and-a-half decades, and had twenty starting quarterbacks along the way. So, why did the Bills think this unpolished 22-year-old quarterback who had not received a single scholarship offer out of high school could turn this beleaguered franchise around? Because Allen knew how to 'handle hard well.'"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

The #1 Business Book Millionaires Won't Tell You About

Ross Harkness

British weightlifting champion, entrepreneur, and founder Ross Harkness assumes you've already read the bestsellers. Why not generate alpha with your next read? "You know the way people say, 'Oh, this book changed my life,' and then they show you Atomic Habits. And don't get me wrong, Atomic Habits is a good book; Deep Work is a great book... they have their place, but when people say they changed their lives, most of the time they're just saying that. It didn't actually change their lives. Thinking in Systems — from the day I read it, it has changed my entire life."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

If you're reading this, you probably have forward neck posture

Veritas

Veritas’s viral thread offers step-by-step exercises to address poor posture and "nerd neck," which can trigger a domino effect of health problems. "Most people don't know this but for every inch of forward head posture, the force on the spine increases by an additional 10-12 pounds. If you have nerd neck, you're asking for knee pain, immobility, and a lifetime of chiropractor visits."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Foundations of Large Language Models

Tong Xiao and Jingbo Zhu

A partnership between Northeastern University and NiuTrans Research produced this guide to LLMs, breaking down fundamentals across four chapters: pre-training, generative models, prompting, and alignment. "Large language models originated from natural language processing, but they have undoubtedly become one of the most revolutionary technological advancements in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years. An important insight brought by large language models is that knowledge of the world and languages can be acquired through large-scale language modeling tasks, and in this way, we can create a universal model that handles diverse problems."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Sovereign Child

Aaron Stupple

Kids need rules—or do they? Father of five and board-certified physician Aaron Stupple sees a simpler approach than either free rein parenting or relentless policing. In The Sovereign Child, Aaron shares advice on how parents can collaborate with children to find "win-win" solutions that honor their intuition yet fits within real-world boundaries. Freed from rigid rules, his kids voluntarily brush their teeth, set aside screens, and even stay still for diaper changes. 

"One thing I’ve learned to do is adopt an overtly playful and even goofy mindset. This worked amazingly with my son when he was a baby. He hated having his diaper changed. I would pin him down with one hand as he writhed and screamed, while I furiously changed him with the other... After a few trials, I made a simple discovery—he didn’t mind having his diaper changed if he was standing! Thereafter, I’d just walk him over to a low table, put a toy on it, and change him standing up. No screaming, no crying, no struggling to get away as his stern-faced father held him down 'for his own good.'

I would never have found the standing-up solution if I remained convinced that there was no fun way to change a diaper, because I wouldn’t have been open to exploring the space of possible win–win solutions. The trouble with rules is that they close off the search for better solutions and instead settle for a certain amount of suffering. Aren’t our kids worth that search?"

We’re thrilled that Aaron is sharing a three-chapter preview of The Sovereign Child. If you enjoy the excerpt, you can download the full PDF on his website for free—and if you’d like to show your thanks, we encourage you to subscribe to his newsletter or to purchase the paperback.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Mike Monteiro's Good News

Each week, designer and author Mike Monteiro answers a reader’s pressing question—whether it’s how to ride a roller coaster, make a grilled cheese, or enjoy being bad at something. From How to get your joy back: "When I say you’re not getting your joy back, I mean that you’re looking in the wrong direction. What brought you joy in the past might not be what brings you joy in the future. And looking to recreate the past holds the risk of speedrunning you right back to the present. So when you say that you now loathe what you used to love that might be your body telling you 'hey, can we not do that again, please!'"

Wisereads Vol. 74 — Tim Ferriss's new book announcement, Gandhi's Experiments with Truth, and more

Last week, we shared John Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, following the fearsome pirate Captain Morgan. This week we're sharing the entirety of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

The Anti-Social Century

Derek Thompson · The Atlantic

Journalist Derek Thompson investigates America’s historical surge in aloneness, linking it to a shift from communal gathering spaces toward more comfortable homes and private entertainment. "Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. 'Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,' Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me... Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers."

My First Book in 7 Years (And Some Big Experiments)

Tim Ferriss · Tim.blog

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, recently teased his upcoming book—a guide to protecting priorities by saying "No" to everything else. He plans to release The No Book serially in his 5-Bullet Friday Newsletter. "The path of no is also the path of selective yesses. This book is a guide to finding the critical few among the trivial many. It’s about finding the big yesses in our lives. Just a few. These may be people, partners, projects, places, and passions—yesses so incredibly fulfilling that they enable us to say no to everything else. In fact, you only have to get a few big yesses right to live a deeply successful and joyful life."

How meditation deconstructs your mind

Oshan Jarow · Vox

Although mindfulness has gone mainstream, Oshan Jarow suggests that breakthroughs in meditation research could unlock deeper, transformative meditation experiences for everyday people. "As psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term 'McMindfulness,' writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s 'like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.' Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

My 17 Minute AI Workflow To Stand Out At Work

Vicky Zhao

Vicky Zhao tackles the "garbage in, garbage out" problem of LLMs by using NotebookLM and Claude to break down rigorous academic papers, providing higher-quality inputs for knowledge work. "Now, most people spend the majority of their time thinking about how they can outsource their thinking process to AI... the results are not particularly fantastic. Why is that? It's because the input that large language models (LLMs) have is pretty average. We're averaging down to the level of the Internet; there's some gold in it, but the majority is pretty mediocre."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

One pattern I’ve noticed in all miserable people

Taylin John Simmonds

Expanding on his viral tweet from last year, Taylin John Simmonds shares how overthinking and underacting breed misery. "Overthinking = scattered consciousness. Focus = single pointed consciousness. If you allow yourself to be distracted by social media, messages, emails, calls, and cheap media…You are training your mind to be chaotic."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Future of Jobs Report 2025

World Economic Forum

Drawing on a survey of over 1,000 employers—representing 14 million workers across 55 economies—the World Economic Forum examines how technology, cost-of-living pressures, and climate-change goals will shape the future of work. "Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill among employers, with seven out of 10 companies considering it as essential in 2025. This is followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, along with leadership and social influence."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Mahatma Gandhi

Revered for his leadership in India’s nonviolent struggle for independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi was also a prolific writer, activist, and lawyer. In his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, he recounts his moral and spiritual development from childhood through his education, marriage, and early professional life in South Africa.

"The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth."

This edition of The Story of My Experiments with Truth is available through Standard Ebooks. In celebration of Public Domain Day in the U.S., they’ve added twenty new titles to their meticulously formatted and free ebook collection here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Chamath Palihapitiya

All-In Pod "Bestie" and Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya delivers weekly reading recommendations on his Substack, covering technology, markets, and the economy. From What I Read This Week: "The Federal Reserve is losing credibility with markets. What's going on?... When the Fed cuts rates, it's trying to make borrowing cheaper throughout the economy. But if markets don't believe in the Fed's economic assessment or policy decisions, they can push back through higher long-term rates, essentially canceling out the Fed's intended effects."

Wisereads Vol. 73 — Altman's Reflections, Steinbeck's Cup of Gold, and more

Last week, we shared the entirety of Learn More Faster by Michael Margolis of Google Ventures, a guide on tackling user research at startups. This week, we're sharing John Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, which follows the fearsome pirate Captain Morgan and just became public domain in the U.S.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Reflections

Sam Altman · blog.samaltman.com

On the second anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, OpenAI founder Sam Altman calls that day a pivotal moment for AI, bringing us closer than ever to AGI and superintelligence. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes."

I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here is How I Mastered My Own.

Chris Hayes · The New York Times

News anchor Chris Hayes recognizes that attention is fleeting, yet points out that people sought distraction from their own minds long before smartphones. "While the state of constant interruption of the attention age may be unwelcome, it grows from a desire that long predates contemporary life. 'When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men,' Pascal observed in 'Pensées,' his collection of essays published in 1670, 'I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.'"

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

Vinay Hiremath · vinay.sh

After spending a few weeks at DOGE, Loom founder Vinay Hiremath booked a one-way ticket to Hawaii to study physics, hoping to confront his insecurities and burning questions. "Why do I feel the need to only be on a journey if it’s grand? What is wrong with being insignificant? Why is letting people down so hard?"

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Do you really need to take 10,000 steps a day?

TED-Ed x Shannon Odell

Debunking the typical "10,000 steps a day" advice, comedian and scientist Shannon Odell explains how adding any amount of walking can yield major health benefits. "Carrying the weight of your body as you walk places stress on the bones. But this stress actually makes the bones stronger, as it stimulates the absorption of calcium and minerals. That's why years of consistent walking can help retain bone density, which usually declines with age. Building a lifelong walking habit comes with many other benefits, from aiding in weight management to reducing your risk for type 2 diabetes, numerous cancers, and dementia."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

I thought I was crazy until I found Richard Feynman

Giuliano

When he’s not reading, Giuliano writes viral tweets drawn from his favorite books and history’s notable figures. Among his takeaways from theoretical physicist Richard Feynman: "You don't understand what 'first principles' really mean until you listen to a physicist reasoning. It's about going to the end of the world chasing a chain of 'whys'," and "There is another real loss in life: The loss of one's sense of humor. It doesn't matter how many labels, prestige, and wisdom you may have. You don't want to go through life without laughing."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Agents

Julia Wiesinger, Patrick Marlow and Vladimir Vuskovic

What are the makings of an agent? Google’s whitepaper likens an agent’s cognitive architecture to a busy chef, composed of a model, orchestration layer, and tools to interface with the outside world. "Imagine a chef in a busy kitchen. Their goal is to create delicious dishes for restaurant patrons which involves some cycle of planning, execution, and adjustment... At each stage in the process the chef makes adjustments as needed, refining their plan as ingredients are depleted or customer feedback is received, and uses the set of previous outcomes to determine the next plan of action."

Hand-picked book of the week

Cup of Gold

John Steinbeck

Long before The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s debut set sail with the treacherous pirate Captain Morgan in Cup of Gold. At first glance, it’s a swashbuckling pirate tale, but tucked within the adventure is a reflection on how the thrill of pursuit compares with the reality of achievement.

"Captain Morgan went back to the treasure. He sat on the floor and took the coins into his hands. 'The most human of all human traits is inconsistency,' he thought. 'It is a shock to learn this thing, almost as great a shock to a man as the realization of his humanity. And why must we learn that last? In all the mad incongruity, the turgid stultiloquy of life, I felt, at least, securely anchored to myself. Whatever the vacillations of other people, I thought myself terrifically constant. But now, here I am, dragging a frayed line, and my anchor gone.'"

This edition of Cup of Gold is available through Standard Ebooks. In celebration of Public Domain Day in the U.S., they’ve added twenty new titles to their meticulously formatted and free ebook collection here.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Max Woolf's Blog

Senior Data Analyst at BuzzFeed, Max Woolf, reports on his experiments with AI on his blog. From Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to "write better code"?: "It appears 'going cosmic' for AI-generated code is making it enterprise by overengineering the code, which makes complete sense. Despite that, the code runs as-is without any bugs... after benchmarking, the algorithm is extremely fast, resulting in about 6 milliseconds a run, or a 100x speedup. My assumption that this prompting was hitting diminishing returns aged very poorly. Maybe numba was the secret all along?"

Wisereads Vol. 72 — Dwarkesh Patel's notes on China, Farnam Street's annual review workbook, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt from Keep Going by Austin Kleon, a short book on creativity, focus, and staying true to yourself. This week, we're sharing the entirety of Learn More Faster, a book of practical methods to quickly identify and understand ideal customers, validate product hypotheses, and refine value propositions by Michael Margolis of Google Ventures.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Casual Viewing

Will Tavlin · n + 1

A journalist argues that by sidestepping the box office, Netflix can define its own metrics of success — resulting in an influx of lackluster films and a grim outlook for both movie enthusiasts and streaming services. "Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed... According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full 'view' — as do 110 users who each watch a single minute."

The Walmart Effect

Rogé Karma · The Atlantic

By reviewing two recent papers, The Atlantic highlights research suggesting Walmart’s always low prices come at a cost to the community, lowering wages and driving unemployment. "Once Walmart has become the major employer in town, it ends up with what economists call 'monopsony power' over workers. Just as monopoly describes a company that can afford to charge exorbitant prices because it lacks any real competition, monopsony describes a company that can afford to pay low wages because workers have so few alternatives."

Notes on China

Dwarkesh Patel · dwarkeshpatel.com

Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel shares insights from his two-week trip to China, meeting locals, admiring architecture, and analyzing everyday life. "It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Stop Worrying & Start Doing: A Simple Way to Organize Your Tasks

Simpletivity

On his channel Simpletivity, Scott Friesen points Google users toward productivity with his tips — this week, on how to isolate daily tasks to boost mental energy. "The three-step formula that we're going to use today is as follows: we're going to shift it forward, we're going to tackle our enemy, and then separate the rest."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Thoughts on the eve of AGI

Will Bryk

The CEO of Exa AI predicts that AGI both unlocks scientific mysteries and upends the work of those who don’t become high-agency problem solvers. "Perhaps the transition people need to make is from getting meaning through individual success to getting meaning through collective success. Many of our current jobs will be automated soon. We'll have to adapt. If you derive meaning from a specific skill, yes that skill might no longer be necessary in 5 years and you're out of luck. But if you can derive meaning from helping the world however you can, well that isn't ever going away."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Annual review workbook

Farnam Street x reMarkable

Create momentum in the new year with Shane Parrish and reMarkable’s new annual review workbook, designed to help you focus on your goals with clarity. "Most people scatter their energy across too many goals - not because they lack skill, but because they resist making bold choices and fear missing opportunities. Your success in 2025 depends more on what you say NO to than what you say yes to."

Hand-picked book of the week

Learn More Faster

Michael Margolis

In the fast-paced world of startups, pausing for traditional user research can sap momentum and cost a first-mover advantage. Fortunately, Michael Margolis at Google Ventures has drawn on his experience guiding 300 companies to create Bullseye Customer Sprints—an approach tailored for founders eager to learn about their ideal customers quickly.

"The best time to conduct Bullseye Customer Sprints is before a team invests a lot of time, money, or reputational risk into building, launching, and marketing an MVP, or before a company expands into a new customer segment. The ROI of customer research is greatest when the risk and cost of building the wrong product are high, such as for hardware, hard tech, healthcare, or any other complex product or service. But even when it’s easy to build an MVP to launch and learn, sunk cost fallacy can undermine a team’s objectivity and willingness to scrap their work. Why risk making a bad first impression when it’s easy to find and fix problems before launch?"

Learn More Faster is available free in its entirety from Google Ventures, so you can start exploring it right away.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Human, being

In her Substack, Erin Nystrom draws on her health and wellness journey and outdoor adventures to explore the human experience. From motion vs. action: "Motion is the ideation, planning, and learning stage. The stage where you’re scrolling Pinterest, making vision boards, watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, reading books, etc. Motion, as I well know, is a dangerous place to be. It feels like you’re doing something, but all the while, the needle isn’t moving an inch. Motion doesn’t produce any results. But it spikes your dopamine just as if it had, which is why it’s so easy to stay there: it feels good without any of the risk. Action is scary."

Wisereads Vol. 71 — Keep Going by Austin Kleon, Anthropic on agents, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of David Kadavy's latest release, How to Sell a Book: What I've learned selling 100,000 self-published nonfiction books. This week, we're sharing an excerpt from Keep Going by Austin Kleon, a short book on creativity, focus, and staying true to yourself, which is on sale for $3.99 through the end of December wherever ebooks are sold.

Because of the winter holidays, this week's Wisereads edition is more streamlined than usual. But don't worry: normal programming resumes next week.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Building effective agents

Anthropic · Anthropic.com

"When to use agents: Agents can be used for open-ended problems where it’s difficult or impossible to predict the required number of steps, and where you can’t hardcode a fixed path. The LLM will potentially operate for many turns, and you must have some level of trust in its decision-making. Agents' autonomy makes them ideal for scaling tasks in trusted environments."

The Ghosts in the Machine

Liz Pelly · Harper's Magazine

"And yet as far as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living."

Faith Is Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be

David Brooks · The New York Times

"I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life... It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How To Actually Achieve Your Goals in 2025 (Evidence-Based)

Ali Abdaal

"Researchers found that if you write down your goals, you're around 42% more likely to actually achieve them. Now, I don't know about you, but if I could improve by 42% the probability of me actually achieving the goals I've set for myself—simply by writing them down—I would probably do that."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Absolutely nobody predicted this: AI Code is the new NoCode

John Rush

"@SoftgenAI is very impressive. It took me 20 minutes to get my app done. Compared to all other tools I've tried, softgen felt the most autonomous. I didn't have to debug things. It did it all on its own," and "Bolt from @stackblitz has had the coolest run so far. Millions of people are using it now. It's absolutely suitable for real-world apps you would otherwise pay $100k to build."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table

Bytedance Inc.

"Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks... general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time."

Hand-picked book of the week

Keep Going

Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon is the author of a trilogy of illustrated books about creativity in the digital age: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. As big fans of Austin's work, we're delighted to share the first chapter of Keep Going—his guide to sustaining creative energy. With memorable tips like: "Forget the noun, do the verb," and "Every day is Groundhog Day," it's both entertaining and insightful.

"We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you’re starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, there’s just today and what you can do with it."

Until the end of December, you can snag the full ebook for $3.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Handpicked RSS feed of the week

Doug Turnbull

From Preferring throwaway code over design docs: "Fail early, gather that organizational knowledge, get to the next idea... This approach dovetails with show don’t tell. A prototype can be worth 1000 design docs. If you want to drive change, you don’t usually do it in docs, but in code."

Wisereads Vol. 70 — Kadavy's How to Sell a Book, Ilya Sutskever's talk, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt of Leading to Thrive by former Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview of David Kadavy's latest release, How to Sell a Book: What I've learned selling 100,000 self-published nonfiction books.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

Most highlighted Articles of the week

Rick Steves Refuses to Get Cynical About the World

Lulu Garcia-Navarro · The New York Times

In an interview with The New York Times, beloved travel guide guru Rick Steves reflects on his career, his cancer diagnosis, and the lessons he’s learned along the way. "A lot of people try to avoid culture shock. And it occurs to me—culture shock is constructive. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective, and it just needs to be curated. You set up experiences, and then you provide a forum for people to share and compare notes."

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know

Zack Savitsky · Quanta Magazine

Although we usually think of entropy as the universe's tendency towards disorder, physicists are converging on a new definition that centers on the observer’s lack of knowledge. "What entropy consistently measures is ignorance: a lack of knowledge about the motion of particles, the next digit in a string of code, or the exact state of a quantum system."

Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It

James Stanier · The Engineering Manager

James Stanier, Shopify’s director of engineering, advocates for deadlines—even if they’re self-imposed—to keep a project's scope, time, and resources in balance. "When wielded with grace, good intentions, and knowledge of what gets humans moving and feeling good, deadlines are a powerful tool. Parkinson's Law is real, and you will need to fight it harder the larger your organization is. If you can succeed in this fight, you can grow and still ship fast with an org size of tens of thousands. If you don't, then one day you'll look around and wonder why your startup turned into the software equivalent of local council's tax office."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Ilya Sutskever: "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks: what a decade"

seremot

A journalist reports on this year’s NeurIPS conference, where Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, reviewed the last decade of AI and projected how the field might progress toward superintelligence—even with a looming data ceiling. "Pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end. Why will it end? Because while computers are growing through better hardware, better algorithms, and logic clusters... We have but one internet. You can even go as far as to say that data is the fossil fuel of AI. It was created somehow, and now we use it. We've achieved peak data and there'll be no more."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

11 of my favorite @paulg essays

Tim Ferriss

Tools of Titans author Tim Ferriss shares quotes from his favorite Paul Graham essays, including Keep Your Identity Small: "The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you," and How to Think for Yourself: "Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you’re told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use

Anthropic

To analyze how their AI agents are used without compromising privacy, Anthropic introduces Clio. "Clio (Claude insights and observations), a privacy-preserving platform that uses AI assistants themselves to analyze and surface aggregated usage patterns across millions of conversations… we use Clio to make our systems safer by identifying coordinated attempts to abuse our systems, monitoring for unknown unknowns during critical periods like launches of new capabilities or major world events, and improving our existing monitoring systems."

Hand-picked book of the week

How to Sell a Book

David Kadavy

Having sold over 100,000 self-published nonfiction books, David Kadavy is well-equipped to guide aspiring authors through choosing the right idea and getting their work into the hands of the right readers. In his latest release, How to Sell a Book, he shares tips on selecting a title, attracting reviews, setting a price, collaborating with influencers, and much more.

"Choosing the right idea for you as an author looks easy if you’re a world-renowned expert with credentials, like Daniel Kahneman was when he wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow. But if your journey is off the beaten path like mine, it takes a combination of exploring what you have to offer, along with being realistic about how much authority you have in a topic, and also realizing unique points of view you don’t notice you have because you are you. It’s really an exciting and often uncomfortable process of self-actualization."

This in-depth preview of How to Sell a Book is exclusive to Wisereads readers. If you enjoy it, you can purchase a full copy with the discount code "READWISE20". Pro tip: All of David's ebooks, including Digital Zettelkasten and How to Write a Book, are compatible with Reader.

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Where's Your Ed At

Once a week, media relations expert Ed Zitron explores tech's impact on society. From Never Forgive Them: "It isn’t that you don’t 'get' tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane."

Wisereads Vol. 69 — Leading to Thrive by Klaus Kleinfeld, book recs from Andrej Karpathy, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt of Codie Sanchez's debut, Main Street Millionaire, a guide to achieving financial freedom. This week, we're sharing an exclusive 4-chapter preview of Leading to Thrive by former Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

How To Make The Greatest Comeback Of Your Life

Dan Koe · thedankoe.com

To escape the trap of a conventional life, Dan Koe encourages readers to meditate on their current stagnation before striking out into the unknown. "The best periods of my life came after getting absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making. I didn’t care what I did. I just had to do something…Most people would call that desperation, but I would call it a mind that’s hungry to learn, grow, and evolve to the next level."

The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone

David J. Morris · The New York Times

In a guest essay, creative writing assistant professor David J. Morris expresses concern over data showing men reading and writing less literature—an art he considers essential. "I am reminded of something that the feminist scholar bell hooks once wrote: 'There remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries' — something I am convinced that literature enables men to do — 'the lives of women, men and children are fundamentally changed for the better.'"

The GPT Era Is Already Ending

Matteo Wong · The Atlantic

Matteo Wong asks whether the innovation behind OpenAI’s o1 model—designed to “think” through its answers—heralds a new era of AI models. "The company has been unusually direct that the o1 series is the future... The company believes, or wants its users and investors to believe, that it has found some fresh magic. The GPT era is giving way to the reasoning era."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

Why Your To-Do List Isn’t Working – And How to Fix It

Tiago Forte

Instead of brute forcing a long daily to-do list, Building a Second Brain author Tiago Forte suggests narrowing your focus to achieve more. "I can't think of a better way to crush all sense of motivation and hope than looking every day at a huge list of tasks that you'll never, ever be able to get to the end of. So my rule is that I always pick a maximum of three tasks from my full list in the morning which I plan on getting done that day."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

Of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me

Andrej Karpathy

1984, Atlas Shrugged, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy all left a lasting impact on Andrej Karpathy. He also recommends The Vital Question: "First time I intuitively grokked the bridge from geology to biology, the origin of life, and likelihood of life in the Universe at large at various stages of complexity and development," and Flowers for Algernon: "Just a totally crushing masterpiece on intelligence."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

AI Creation and the Cosmic Host

Nick Bostrom

Known for his philosophical takes on AI and existential risk in Deep Utopia and Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom now contemplates "cosmic hosts" and a metaverse in his latest paper. "There may well exist a normative structure, based on the preferences or concordats of a cosmic host, and which has high relevance to the development of AI. In particular, we may have both moral and prudential reason to create superintelligence that becomes a good cosmic citizen—i.e. conforms to cosmic norms and contributes positively to the cosmopolis."

Hand-picked book of the week

Leading to Thrive

Klaus Kleinfeld

In the short term, visionary leaders often make sacrifices. In the long run, pursuing business success at the expense of personal wellbeing is unsustainable. In Leading to Thrive, Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld draws on his extensive leadership experience to show how winning the “Inner Game” generates and sustains the energy needed for the “Outer Game” of guiding companies to greatness.

"At its most basic, leadership is all about getting people to do what you’d like them to do. Sometimes, it’s what they may not want to do at that moment, or maybe at all. One of the most powerful rules of leadership is to create a strong intrinsic motivation.

One of my favorite childhood passages is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Citadelle. It’s full of wit and wisdom. Here’s one piece of wisdom I particularly enjoy: 

'If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.'"

We're psyched that this preview of Leading to Thrive includes four chapters—two focusing on the inner game (Part I), and two introducing leadership tactics (Part II). If you enjoy the excerpt, you can order a full copy of Klaus' debut here, available now.

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Escape to the Bookshop

Live vicariously through Sarah Bringhurst Familia as she documents her journey to open a bookshop in a quaint Italian hill-town. From What inspired me to open a bookshop in Italy: "When we walk in a certain bookshop—imagine yourself there now, wherever that bookshop is for you—there’s a thing that makes us want to catch our breath. I think it’s our sense that the space feels sacred, like a temple to everything we know a book can be. And that’s the kind of space I want to make."

Wisereads Vol. 68 — Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez, Facebook's little red book, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Good Nature by Dr. Kathy Willis, a compelling call to reconnect with nature. This week, we're sharing an excerpt of Codie Sanchez's debut book, Main Street Millionaire, a guide to achieving financial freedom.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

52 things I learned in 2024

Tom Whitwell · Medium

Journalist Tom Whitwell returns with his annual list of fascinating facts—one for each week of the year. Among them, a tidbit on trademarks: "There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene," and the triumph of Egypt: "After 100 years of work, Egypt is now officially free of malaria, the disease that killed Tutankhamen."

In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

Ed Simon · Lit Hub

Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age was dismissed as a simplistic, fussy anti-tech manifesto. Today, author and Carnegie Mellon faculty member Ed Simon revisits Birkerts's arguments, which now seem more resonant than ever. "As an antidote to the virtual obliteration of the self, Birkerts returns to literature, arguing that in the 'slow and meditative possession of a book,' what he calls 'deep reading,' we are able to 'keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.'"

The Mystery of Food Deserts

Stacy Mitchell · The Atlantic

Stacy Mitchell traces the prevalence of food deserts—low-income neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is miles away—to the government’s failure to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act. "Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn't materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

watch this if you want to become the top 1%

Alex Hormozi

Never one to mince words, entrepreneur and $100M Offers author Alex Hormozi lays out what it really takes to succeed: sacrifice, hard work, tenacity, and time. "The rich buy time, the poor buy stuff, ambitious people buy skills, and lazy people buy distractions."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

X hates LinkedIn

Justin Welsh

Justin Welsh, who earns millions annually from his LinkedIn presence, reveals the secrets to creating a compelling profile. His tips include showing off in the about section: "Your about section is all about social proof. That means it's time to brag. What makes you worth following?" and creating a clear tagline: "Your tagline is often a make-or-break moment. The goal of the tagline is to tell people: Who you are, what you're working on, what they should expect."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

The little red book

Facebook

Matthew Parkhurst took it upon himself to preserve Facebook’s iconic little red book—a decade-old time capsule capturing the sweeping optimism and vision that accompanied the company’s massive growth. "Connection is the fundamental unit of society. And increasing the number of ways people can connect, and the number of people they can connect to, is a powerful tool for good. It blurs lines. It alters perspectives. It humanizes. Because when everyone is considered an 'us,' there's a lot less of 'us vs. them.'"

Hand-picked book of the week

Main Street Millionaire

Codie Sanchez

In a landscape awash with get-rich-quick schemes, Codie Sanchez’s newly released Main Street Millionaire stands apart. Rather than betting on crypto or risky startups, she reveals a path to wealth by acquiring everyday “Main Street” businesses—like laundromats and trash services—that quietly keep communities thriving. Packed with frameworks, exercises, and real success stories, Codie's debut is as compulsively readable as it is actionable.

"Your salary will never set you free. Your financial freedom can only come through ownership. More specifically, through equity done the right way.

This is not what most of us were taught. Every day in school all the way up to your first job, you’ve been trained like Pavlov’s dog to follow the path of non-ownership. You’ve been zapped and given treats to believe that a good job is the real key to financial stability. Lies. No matter how hard you work, you will forever be a cocker spaniel begging for biscuits. That’s because you are trading your time for money, which means it’s impossible for you to break free. Warren Buffett said it best: 'If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.'"

We're particularly tickled that Codie is sharing a preview of Main Street Millionaire with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the excerpt, you can order a full copy here to unlock the secrets of the rich.

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Cal Newport

Slow Productivity author Cal Newport offers advice on deep work, digital minimalism, and building a meaningful life on his blog. From The Tao of Cal: "In building a meaningful and fulfilling life, it’s usually better to work backwards from a broad vision of your ideal lifestyle than it is to work forward toward a singular grand goal (e.g., a 'dream job' or radical location change) that you hope will make everything better."

Wisereads Vol. 67 — Good Nature by Kathy Willis, Steven Johnson on context windows, and more

Last week, we shared a chapter of How to Think Like Socrates by Donald J. Robertson, a deep dive into the life of one of history's greatest thinkers. This week, we're sharing a preview of Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health by Dr. Kathy Willis, a compelling call to reconnect with nature. 

Quick note: If you've sent a message to our support team over the Thanksgiving holiday, please hold tight! We'll be back in the office tomorrow to reply as usual.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

You Exist In The Long Context

Steven Johnson

Author and NotebookLM co-creator Steven Johnson reveals how AI's expanded context windows are quietly revolutionizing language models. Now capable of "seeing the entire haystack", these models are transitioning from forgetful conversationalists to collaborative thinkers. "A world where you can use AI to draw upon the compiled wisdom of an expert that you trust—that is a world we are living in right now, thanks to the emergence of long context models."

Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting

Ethan Mollick

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick demystifies AI by emphasizing hands-on experience over perfection. "The single most useful thing you can do to understand AI is to use AI", he advises. He suggests getting started by spending 10 hours on meaningful tasks and treating AI as "an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them with each new conversation."

A career ending mistake

John Arundel

Don’t let your career be an accident, warns John Arundel, as he urges tech professionals to consciously choose their paths. "If you don't change direction, you may end up where you're heading. But is that where you want to go?”

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

An Honest Review of Apple Intelligence... So Far

Marques Brownlee

In his candid critique of the much-anticipated Apple Intelligence, Marques Brownlee questions the practicality and fulfillment of Apple's AI promises to date, suggesting that the groundbreaking innovation remains unfulfilled. "You could use them, and they might work really well, but should you?"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

What’s Coming: The Changing Domestic and World Orders Under the Trump Administration

Ray Dalio

Investor Ray Dalio predicts a dramatic overhaul of the U.S. domestic and international order under a future Trump administration—likening it to a corporate hostile takeover aimed at efficiency and national strength. "Think of Gordon Gekko and the perspective in his 'greed is good' speech... who is going to take that approach to the central government and the entire country."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

On The Impossible

Martin Shkreli

In a scathing analysis that sent Cassava Sciences' stock plummeting, Martin Shkreli dissects the company's Alzheimer's drug, Simufilam, predicting its failure in Phase III trials. He challenges the drug's implausible mechanism targeting filamin A and scrutinizes its clinical data, asserting, "Clinical trials, done correctly, are deterministic. There is no chance... If there is a potent effect: it will be seen".

Hand-picked book of the week

Good Nature

Kathy Willis

While we can agree that a walk in the woods soothes the soul, do we know why? Until recently, we lacked data to understand nature's influence on our health and wellbeing. In Good Nature, Oxford Professor of Biodiversity Kathy Willis explores how small interactions with nature—seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and touching natural elements—can transform our health.

"In the UK alone, 7.6 million people are currently living with cardiovascular disease: globally, it is the leading cause of death. And currently around 15 per cent of the UK population are taking antidepressants. The information now available to us provides another weapon in our armoury in the fight to combat these modern-day plagues and health crises. The recommended solutions are simple, economical and easy for anyone to do. The prescription is nature."

We're thrilled that Kathy is sharing a preview of Good Nature with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the excerpt, we invite you to preorder a full copy here before it comes out Tuesday. 🙏

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Visual Growth

A picture is worth a thousand words, and Ash Lamb's Substack proves it. His minimalist visuals convey powerful messages in minutes. From Context before advice: "That’s when it hit me: advice without context is useless. Only take guidance from those who share your definition of "good," or you’ll be chasing someone else’s version of excellence." 

Wisereads Vol. 66 — How to Think Like Socrates by Donald Robertson, Casey Neistat on hard things, and more

Last week, we shared L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an imaginative fairy tale for all ages. This week, we're sharing How to Think Like Socrates by Donald J. Robertson, a deep dive into the life of one of history's greatest thinkers.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

How the Ivy League Broke America

David Brooks · The Atlantic

Because graduates of top U.S. universities often ascend to leadership roles, David Brooks envisions a future where they prioritize dedication and curiosity over raw intelligence. "In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: 'The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.' What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower."

A Chance to Build

Ben Thompson · Stratechery

In his latest essay, Ben Thompson analyzes how looming tariffs could both constrict the software market and enable U.S. businesses to develop a niche in hardware manufacturing, despite decades of outsourcing production to China. "The symbiotic relationship between Silicon Valley software makers and Asian hardware manufactures is one of the most potent economic combinations in history, and it may be impossible to compete with; if it’s ever going to work, though, the best opportunity — absent a war, God forbid — is probably right now."

Principles

Nabeel S. Qureshi · nabeelqu.co

Stealth startup founder Nabeel Qureshi reflects on his guiding principles in a listicle, sharing wisdom like: "Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much 'rest,'" and "The most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

DO HARD THINGS

Casey Neistat

Join YouTuber Casey Neistat on his ninth attempt to conquer his "hard thing": running the NYC Marathon course in under three hours. "The thing about hard things, especially the hard things you don't have to do but choose to do, is that you can just bail any time. That's when you start to question, 'What even is this? Does it really matter?'"

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

The Harvard debate guy is a genius

Willie Chou

Ghostwriter Willie Chou distills the wisdom of Bo Seo, two-time world debating champion and author of Good Arguments, into bite-sized tips. "Don’t settle for arguing against a weak or flawed statement. When you address their strongest point, you create real progress. Build up their case if needed. Sell your truth to the listener."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Aaron Shaw, et al.

A team of researchers found that using interview data instead of demographic and survey data enhances models that predict human behavior—achieving 85% of the accuracy of people's own answers two weeks later. "How might, for instance, a diverse set of individuals respond to new public health policies and messages, react to product launches, or respond to major shocks? When simulated individuals are combined into collectives, these simulations could help pilot interventions, develop complex theories capturing nuanced causal and contextual interactions, and expand our understanding of structures like institutions and networks."

Hand-picked book of the week

How to Think Like Socrates

Donald J. Robertson

To get to the heart of Stoicism and Western philosophy, it helps to look back at one of history's greatest thinkers: Socrates. In How to Think Like Socrates, psychotherapist Donald J. Robertson transports readers to 5th-century BCE Athens, transforming ancient philosophical wisdom into practical lessons for the modern era.

"From 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' to 'He who hesitates is lost,' we have many proverbs that offer conflicting advice. The truth, of course, is that sometimes it is good to rush in; other times it is better to pause for thought. We must learn to adapt to circumstances. Wisdom requires being able to identify when a rule no longer holds true, and good advice becomes bad advice."

We're thrilled that Donald is sharing Chapter 4 with Wisereads readers, introducing the Socratic method. If you enjoy the preview, How to Think Like Socrates is already available here to purchase. 🎉

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Sentiers

Every Sunday, Patrick Tanguay sends out his "futures thinking observatory" newsletter, offering thoughtful commentary on a handful of curated reads. From issue No.329: Conceptual models of space colonization: "I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Shannon Mattern that I didn’t love and the streak is still alive with this one. Here she writes about trees, property, boundaries, and 'historical ‘metes and bounds’ methods.' It might not sound fascinating at first, but as usual Mattern goes deep and broad, and unpacks the history."

Wisereads Vol. 65 — Vitalik Buterin on prediction markets, The Wizard of Oz, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of Erica Rooney's Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, a guide to breaking free from limiting beliefs and habits. This week, we're sharing L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an imaginative fairy tale for all ages.

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Most highlighted Articles of the week

Procrastination and the Fear of Not Being 'Good Enough'

Swapnil Chauhan · swapnilchauhan.com

After a three-year hiatus from his blog, backend software engineer Swapnil Chauhan returns with insights on the root of procrastination: fear and the need for social approval. "I know that the only way to get better at writing is to actually write. So my plan is simple: write often, read more, and slowly improve until I reach a point where I can be proud of my work."

From prediction markets to info finance

Vitalik Buterin · vitalik.eth.limo

While Polymarket outperformed polls in predicting the recent U.S. election, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sees even greater potential for prediction markets. "Info finance solves trust problems that people actually have. A common concern of this era is the lack of knowledge (and worse, lack of consensus) about whom to trust, in political, scientific and commercial contexts. Info finance applications could help be part of the solution."

How I ship projects at big tech companies

Sean Goedecke · seangoedecke.com

Shipping isn't the same as finishing code. According to GitHub engineer Sean Goedecke, successfully shipping requires a different set of skills. "No matter the project goal, your leadership team (the people in your reporting chain who care about the project) will always have basically zero technical context about the project compared to you. That means they will be trusting you for estimates, to answer technical questions, and to anticipate technical problems. Maintaining that trust should be your top priority."

Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week

How to Identify Your Own Superpowers — and Why It Matters

Shreyas Doshi

There's a time and place to ask mentors for guidance, but Shreyas Doshi advises first looking within to discover your own strengths and weaknesses. "That's part of the garbage we need to discard as we get to better self-discovery. Stop asking anybody, 'What should I do?'... We want these kinds of answers from people we consider smart or more successful or whatever label you want to put on it. Because there is fear; there is a lack of conviction, there's a lack of confidence. But most importantly—and this is the toughest one—there is a fear of taking accountability and ownership of our own lives."

Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week

This is Dario Amodei

Ben Averbook

Aided by Claude, 20-year-old Ben Averbook highlights key moments from Dario Amodei's five-hour interview with Lex Fridman on Anthropic and the future of AI. "Smart, educated people rarely cause catastrophic harm. This 'natural safeguard' protected humanity for centuries. But AI breaks this correlation—giving dangerous capabilities to anyone."

Most highlighted PDF of the week

Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation

Aidan Toner-Rodgers

An MIT PhD student's analysis reveals that when skilled materials scientists incorporate AI into their work, productivity significantly increases but job satisfaction may decline. "AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions…these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization."

Hand-picked book of the week

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum

Declared by the Library of Congress as "America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale," The Wonderful Wizard of Oz continues to enchant readers of all ages. Join Dorothy and her dog Toto as they journey along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City in this timeless adventure.

"Thereafter he walked very carefully, with his eyes on the road, and when he saw a tiny ant toiling by he would step over it, so as not to harm it. The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.

'You people with hearts,' he said, 'have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn’t mind so much.'"

This edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

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More To That

Fueled by curiosity, Lawrence Yeo explores humanity through storytelling and endearing illustrations. From Metric-Less Success: "The people that will be crying when you depart the world are not doing so because of any number that is tied to your name. They are doing so because you were a loving partner, a caring friend, or a shepherd of kindness. You are dearly missed not because of what you’ve earned, but because of what you represented."