Wisereads Vol. 149 — The Plunge by Chris Ballard, Derek Thompson on the Enhanced Self, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Dad Brain by Darby Saxbe. This week, we're sharing a preview of Chris Ballard's recent release, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It's Not Productivity)
Return-to-office mandates are often more about ego than productivity, argues Adam Grant, the Wharton psychologist behind Think Again. "Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets."
The Coming Loop
Flask creator Armin Ronacher worries that autonomous agent loops will amplify the weaknesses already present in today's models. "Either we need to find clever ways to jolt the human back into the loop and make the changes of the loops legible long term, or we need to find better ways to compose these ever more complex systems."
The Cult of the Enhanced Self
Journalist Derek Thompson on how optimizing health has quietly become a status marker, and the tradeoff that creeps in once the body becomes a project. "The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect my midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How Do You Stay Motivated?
Feel-Good Productivity author and YouTuber Ali Abdaal on what keeps him building once self-employment has already delivered the freedom he was after. "Some amount of freedom comes from making money. Right? Because then you're able to quit the job, you're able to spend your time doing what you want, etc. But at a certain point, the rest of your freedom comes from leaving money on the table."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
The Agent Loop Architecture
Building on Matt Van Horn's recent post tracing the evolution of loops, Inngest co-founder Dan Farrelly proposes an architecture for agentic loops. "Three layers: loop, skill, orchestrator. The loop is the unit of work. The skill is the asset. The orchestration engine is what makes both durable. The sidecar pattern is the model: an agent writes its own durable skills, deploys them, reviews how they perform, and iterates."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Semiquincententacles
J.P. Morgan strategist Michael Cembalest fronts his 250th-anniversary market survey with the "Aquilaceph," a half-bald eagle, half-octopus emblem of America's grasp on global markets. On US stocks: "As recently as 2015 the 10 largest US stocks represented just 17% of S&P 500 market cap. Now this figure has risen to ~40%. This might surprise you, but 40% concentration still ranks among the three lowest equity concentration figures in the world; only Japan and India have less."
Hand-picked book of the week
The Plunge
After turning to cold-water exposure as a way to extend his athletic life, award-winning Sports Illustrated writer Chris Ballard spent three years immersed in a world of cold-water devotees, and came away with a discovery: they were "deliriously happy." Praised by Adam Grant, The Plunge is nominally a book about plunging into freezing water, but it’s really about the people who organize their lives around doing hard things, and why.
"So much of modern life is built around easy. We live in climate-controlled houses, from which we drive climate-controlled cars to climate-controlled workspaces where we sit all day, talking and typing and staring at flashing images on metal boxes. Strap a Fitbit on many Americans, and you’ll see how easy it’s become to get through the day—even thrive professionally—without physical challenges.
Having engineered them out of daily life, we now need to seek them out. And surviving a plunge, even for thirty seconds, is hard. It provides a blast of confidence. You feel tougher, more capable."
We’re thrilled to share a preview of The Plunge with Wisereads readers. If it leaves you tempted to brave the cold, you can grab a copy wherever you get your books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Sasha’s 'Newsletter'
Journalist Sasha Chapin, husband to Cate Hall and co-author of their forthcoming book on agency, You Can Just Do Things, writes candid reflections on books, enneagram results, relationships, and the inner life. From Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy: "The proper end of introspection is not being filled with facts about oneself. Your introspection is successful if it is finite, if it leads you towards direct contact with experience. Get out of the way of your becoming."