shelf

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” ⸺Virginia Woolf

books

recent

to illustrate a subset of the ideas that have been on my mind lately.

• Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse (re-read)
• Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Richard Evans
• On Photography, Susan Sontag
• Focus: The ASML Way, Marc Hijnk
• The Age of Awakening, Amit Kapoor

recommendations

i keep thinking of and coming back to these books, and try to maintain a high bar for this list.

• Newton’s “Principia” for the Common Reader, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
• On What Matters, Derek Parfit
• In Praise of Commercial Culture, Tyler Cowen
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Vegetarian, Han Kang

essays

recent

• E Unibus Pluram, David Foster Wallace
• Chimeras
• Do real-output and real-wage measures capture reality?, William R. Nordhaus
• DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report, DeepSeek-AI
• Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei
• Underrated reasons to be thankful, Dynomight
• Culture Drift Predicts Decadence, Robin Hanson
• Losing my mind in the Siskiyous, Will Hathaway

recommendations

• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
• We are in triage every second of every day, Holly Elmore
• Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally, Holden Karnofsky
• The Mundanity of Excellence: A Report on Stratification & Olympic Swimmers, Daniel F. Chambliss
• Thoughts on Man’s Purpose in Life, Adm. Hyman G. Rickover
• Becoming a Magician, Anonymous
• 500 million, but not a single one more, Jai Dhyani
• The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf
• We Choose to Go to the Moon, John F. Kennedy
• Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes, Robin Hanson
• Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes
• Three reasons to cooperate, Paul F. Christiano

quotes

• “The difference between a Turing machine and a finite state machine is the tape.”
• “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
• “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”