A six-week reading and discussion cluster on decision-making under irreducible uncertainty: how taste forms, how judgment fails, and how selection becomes power.
Distinction
Pierre Bourdieu
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Richard Hamming
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
The Creative Act
Rick Rubin
Range
David Epstein
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Bird by Bird
Anne Lamott
Power Without Office
A six-week reading and discussion cluster on informal power: legitimacy without appointment, agenda-setting, defaults, and how influence hardens into institutions.
On Power
Bertrand de Jouvenel
The Managerial Revolution
The Managerial Revolution
James Burnham
Authority
Richard Sennett
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer
The Revolt of the Public
Martin Gurri
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Lawrence Lessig
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Douglass North
From Third World to First
Lee Kuan Yew
Kissinger
Walter Isaacson
Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Power Broker
Robert A. Caro
Conspiracy
Ryan Holiday
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order
Ray Dalio
Silicon Valley Canon
The essential books, essays, and talks that have shaped the culture of Silicon Valley and the people behind its fastest-growing companies. Based on Patrick Collison's book list.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
Richard P. Feynman
The Innovators
Walter Isaacson
Founders at Work
Jessica Livingston
Zero to One
Peter Thiel & Blake Masters
The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
Finite and Infinite Games
Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott
Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit
Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit
Balaji Srinivasan
The Vulnerable World Hypothesis
The Vulnerable World Hypothesis
Nick Bostrom
The Singularity Is Near
Ray Kurzweil
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Architecture of Control
How systems, codes, and designs shape behavior without anyone noticing.
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Lawrence Lessig
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
A Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout
An Elegant Puzzle
Will Larson
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
The Outsider's Advantage
Why the people who change everything are never insiders.
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
Shoe Dog
Phil Knight
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer
Barbarian Days
William Finnegan
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
The Contrarian
Max Chafkin
Chaos Monkeys
Antonio García Martínez
The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
Can't Hurt Me
David Goggins
Stories We Tell Ourselves
How narratives — personal, cultural, mythological — construct reality.
The Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
René Girard
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
1984
George Orwell
The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Building Under Pressure
What it actually takes to build something when the stakes are existential.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Skunk Works
Ben Rich
American Prometheus
Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
Loonshots
Safi Bahcall
Only the Paranoid Survive
Andy Grove
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou
The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
The Fragility Problem
Why robust-looking systems break and what survives.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Stand
Stephen King
When Money Dies
Adam Fergusson
The Revolt of the Public
Martin Gurri
The Decadent Society
Ross Douthat
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
The Plague
Albert Camus
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
The Lone Mind
Solitude, obsession, and what happens when someone goes deep alone.
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
The Book of Disquiet
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Essays in Idleness
Yoshida Kenkō
The Mezzanine
Nicholson Baker
The Legitimacy Trap
Who gets to decide what's real, true, or valuable — and how that power gets captured.
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
The Diversity Myth
Peter Thiel
The Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
The Sovereign Individual
James Dale Davidson
Animal Farm
George Orwell
The Dehumanization of Art
The Dehumanization of Art
José Ortega y Gasset
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rome, Inc.
Stanley Bing
The Art of Not Being Governed
James C. Scott
The Managerial Revolution
The Managerial Revolution
James Burnham
The Information Edge
How knowing what to pay attention to becomes the ultimate advantage.
The Big Short
Michael Lewis
Poor Charlie's Almanack
Charlie Munger
Hackers and Painters
Paul Graham
Contact
Carl Sagan
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
The Dream Machine
M. Mitchell Waldrop
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Model Thinker
Scott Page
Liar's Poker
Michael Lewis
Range
David Epstein
Factfulness
Hans Rosling
The Everything Store
Brad Stone
The New New Thing
Michael Lewis
The Shape of Time
Why some ideas take centuries to land and others arrive too early.
