Library

The history of molecular biology from roughly the 1930s to 1970s. Be warned, this is not a breeze to read, but it is one of the most remarkable science books I ever picked up. Reading this is about as close as you can get to having a front-row seat to how scientists go from ignorance and confusion to insight and unifying theory without being one yourself. I want to do this one justice and write more about it at some point, ping me if you see this after 2026 is over and I still haven’t!

Maybe more meme than book at this point. For the gist, read vgr’s post about the central idea of “legibility”. He hints at parallels in tech (waterfall project planning), but I often find myself thinking about this when someone wants to add 20 strictly-validated form fields across 15 rigid worflow steps in some tool, hoping it will make reality conform to the platonic ideal of the process, but most likely just making people hate their job and put everything important in the unstructured “notes” field instead.

Less a guide for trading, more a tour of the associated worldview. I’ve encountered much of this already over the years by way of economics, interviews with people with a finance background, and “general online exposure”. This is the most concise summary of this kind of reasoning and the associated mental models I’ve seen so far. Recommended reading, even if you keep your money in a cheap broad index fund, as you probably should and which reading this will make you more likely to do.

This is the canonical book explaining timeless and domain-agnostic principles of good design. Unfortunately it also seems to fail to apply its own insight to writing and is terribly disorganized. Looking past that, I still found it worthwhile as an introduction.

Duttweiler was the founder of Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, which (of course) is organized as a federation of cooperatives. Randomly found this in my university’s free library one day. The writing is so-so, and far from impartial, but I stuck with it and was rewarded. The origin story of Migros, and Duttweiler’s various other ventures, are a pretty inspiring example of entrepreneurial spirit winning against incumbents trying everything to entrench the comfortable-for-them status quo, majorly improving the situation for consumers. I also did not fully realize before how weirdly protectionist and cronyist Switerland used to be, e.g. enacting a law (German) that prohibited chains from opening new stores or expanding existing ones.

Sacks has recently been somewhat disgraced for apparently making up a lot of stuff in his case studies. Luckily I mainly knew him as the extremely colorful and unhinged character of this and his other memoir, so I don’t think my view shifted much and I’d probably still recommend reading this if you like the genre.