Last year, I wrote a piece called “Thirty Books I Want to Read Before I Turn Thirty.” The somewhat eclectic list actually consisted of twenty-four books, with empty slots left to add six more as the year went on. Roughly two-thirds of the books were well-known classics, while the remainder …
James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” is a fascinating account of how centralization schemes fail. The book’s title follows from a simple observation: centralized administrators need legibility to function. A state can’t collect taxes unless it knows who its citizens are and how much income they’re …
The Vietnam War is foreign to me. My father was far too young to be drafted, as he was in elementary school when the war ended. By the time I was that age, Vietnam had opened itself to foreign tourists. To my generation of Americans, Vietnam is an exotic vacation …
This book convincingly demonstrates that we humans constantly deceive others and ourselves alike in the service of our own selfish motives. What's less clear is what implications follow from that.
The book is divided into two sections. The first lays out the immense array of ways in which humans are …
I recently turned 29, and in honor of that milestone I've assembled a list of thirty books I'd like to read before I turn 30.
From the end of high school until a few years ago, I undervalued books. I mostly consumed writing I found online. Online articles can be …