Thinking Tools / Learning How to Learn

  1. The Lifetime Learner’s Guide to Reading and Learning, Gary Hoover

  2. How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren

  3. Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley

  4. Mindshift, Barbara Oakley

  5. An Incomplete Education, Judy Jones

  6. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose

  7. Seeking Wisdom: from Darwin to Munger, Peter Bevelin

  8. A Handbook for New Stoics, Massimo Pigliucci

  9. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett

  10. How to Solve It, George Pólya

  11. The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts, Shane Parrish

  12. Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger

  13. Thinking In Systems, Donella Meadows

  14. The Systems Bible, John Gall

  15. Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, Cecilia Hayes

  16. The Model Thinker, Scott Page

  17. Investing: The Last Liberal Art, William Hagstrom

  18. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Richard Nisbett

  19. Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, Gerd Gigerenzer

  20. How to Take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens

  21. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning How to Learn, Richard Hamming

  22. You and Your Research, Richard Hamming

  23. https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

  24. https://ncase.me/remember/ (This is the best introduction to Spaced Repetition learning)

  25. https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230413-effective-spaced-repetition/ (another intro to Spaced Repetition)

America & Growth

  1. Americana, Bhu Srinavasan

  2. Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, Michael Lind

  3. An Empire of Wealth, John Steele Gordon

  4. The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon

  5. Railroaded: The Transcontinental and the Making of Modern America, Richard White

  6. Lone Star: A History of Texas, T.R. Fehrenbach

  7. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, Joyce Appleby

  8. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon

  9. The Noblest Triumph: Property & Prosperity Through the Ages, Tom Bethall

  10. Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson

  11. Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fisher

  12. American Colossus, H.W. Brands

  13. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard

  14. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860 - 1925, John Higham

  15. Before Columbus: The Americas of the 1491, Charles C. Mann

  16. 1493, Charles C. Mann

  17. A History of American in 100 Maps, Susan Schulten

  18. Making of the American Self, Daniel Walker Howe

  19. The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz

  20. The Oxford History of the United States

China & The New Eurasia

  1. The Qing Empire and the Opium War: The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty, Haijian Mao

  2. Red Capitalism, Fraser Howie

  3. The Wobbling Pivot, China since 1800: An Interpretive History, Pamela Kyle Crossley

  4. China’s Crony Capitalism, The Dynamics of Regime Decay, Minxin Pei

  5. Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation, Victor Shih

  6. Deng Xiaoping, Ezra Vogel

  7. The Dawn of the New Eurasia, Bruno Macaes

  8. The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan

  9. Belt and Road, Bruno Macaes

  10. Out of the Gobi, Weijian Shan

  11. Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos

  12. A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman, Ida Pruitt and Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai

  13. The Travels of Lao Can, Liu T'ieh-Yun

  14. God’s Chinese Son, Jonathan Spence

The Evolution of Technology & Silicon Valley History

  1. Chip War, Chris Miller

  2. ASML's Architects: The Engineers who Shaped the World's Most Powerful Chip Machines, René Raaijmakers

  3. The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur

  4. The Chip, T.R. Reid

  5. The Dream Machine, Mitchell Waldrop

  6. The Intel Trinity, Michael S. Malone

  7. How the Internet Happened, Brian McCullough

  8. Engines That Move Markets, Alisdair Nairn

  9. The Lever of Riches, Joel Mokyr

  10. Energy and Civilisation, Vaclav Smil

  11. How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets, Andy Kessler

  12. Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner

  13. Crystal Fire: Birth of the Information Age, Michael Riordan

  14. The New New Thing, Michael Lewis

  15. Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, Christoph Lecuyer

  16. Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik

  17. The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner

  18. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, David Edgerton

  19. Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez

  20. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond

  21. Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston

  22. Hooked, Nir Eyal

  23. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, B. J. Fogg

Design of Buildings, Cities & Things

  1. Structures, Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, J.E. Gordon

  2. How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand

  3. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

  4. The Power Broker, Robert Caro

  5. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman

  6. The City in History, Lewis Mumford

  7. Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, Alain Bertaud

  8. Human Transit, Jarrett Walker

  9. Rethinking America's Highways: A 21st-Century Vision for Better Infrastructure, Robert W. Poole

  10. The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

  11. A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

  12. https://jica-net-library.jica.go.jp/library/jn325/UrbanLandUsePlanningSystem_all.pdf

  13. Building Secure and Reliable Systems, Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer et al

The History and Nature of the Corporation

  1. The Shareholder Value Myth, Lynn Stout (associated paper)

  2. The Corporation That Changed the World, Robins

  3. The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, Micklethwait & Woolridge

  4. We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Winkler

  5. Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, Zakim

  6. Firm Commitment, Colin Mayer

  7. The Organisation Man, William H. Whyte

  8. Lessons from Century Club Companies, Viki TenHaken

  9. The Peter Principle, Laurence J. Peter

  10. The Gervais Principle, Venkatesh Rao

High Quality Industry-Specific Books

  1. The Luxury Strategy, J.N. Kapferer, V. Bastien

  2. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natsha Dow-Schull

  3. Ninety Percent of Everything, Rose George

  4. Electronic Value Exchange, David L. Stearns

  5. Payments Systems in the U.S.A: A Guide for the Payments Professional, Carol Coye Benson

  6. The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr

  7. Faster, Better, Cheaper: Manufacturing from the Stone Age to Lean and Beyond, Christoh Roser

  8. Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals, Rob Thompson

  9. Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, Bill Friedman

  10. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, Andreas Bernard

  11. Cable Cowboys, Mark Roubichaux

  12. Merchants of Grain, Dan Morgan

  13. Attention Merchants, Tim Wu

  14. Junk to Gold (Copart), Willis Johnson

  15. Becoming Trader Joe, Joe Colombe

  16. Walt Disney: The Biography, Neal Gabler

  17. Dynasties of the Sea, Lori Ann LaRocco

  18. The Operator, Tom King

  19. The Quest, Daniel Yergin

  20. Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane

  21. The Green and the Black, Gary Sernovitz

  22. American Icon, Bryce G. Hoffman

  23. Overhaul, Steven Rattner

  24. The Machine that Changed the World, James Womack

  25. Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

  26. One Buck at a Time, Earl Swift, Macon Brock

  27. My Father’s Business, Cal Turner Jr

  28. The Meat Racket, Christopher Leonard

  29. Crisis in Bethlehem, John Strohmeyer

  30. The Soul of a New Machine, Tracey Kidder

  31. The Box, Marc Levinson

  32. The Farmer from Merna: A History of the State Farm Insurance Companies, Karl Schriftgeisser

  33. Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech, Sally Smith Hughes

  34. Preserving the Promise, Scott Desain

  35. Devils on the Deep Blue Sea, Kristoffer Garin

  36. The Big Score, Jacquie McNish

  37. Steel: From Mine to Mill, Brooke Stoddard

  38. The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr

  39. Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?, Max Gergel

  40. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, Tom Gjelten

  41. Blood: an Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. Douglas Starr

  42. The King of Oil, Daniel Ammann

  43. Aerodynamic: Inside the High Stakes Global Jetliner Ecosystem, Kevin Michaels

  44. Never Lost Again, Bill Kilday

  45. The Political Spectrum, Thomas Winslow Hazlett

  46. The Master Switch, Tim Wu

  47. The One Device, Brian Merchant

  48. Wireless Nation, James Murray

  49. The Cravath Firm & Its Predecessors, Robert T. Swaine

  50. https://americanbusinesshistory.org/books/

Market History

  1. The Panic of 1907, Robert Bruner

  2. Only Yesterday, the 1920s in America, Frederick Lewis Allen

  3. The Great Crash, J.K. Galbraith

  4. Since Yesterday, the 1930s in America, Frederick Lewis Allen

  5. The Go Go Years, John Brooks

  6. Barbarians at the Gate, Brian Burroughs & John Heylar

  7. Running Money, Andy Kessler

  8. Bull!, Maggie Mahar

  9. Capital Account, Marathon Asset Management, ed. Edward Chancellor

  10. Mr Market Miscalculates, James Grant

  11. Decade of Delusion, Frank Martin

  12. Capital Returns, Marathon Asset Management, ed. Edward Chancellor

  13. Fault Lines, Raghuram Rajan

The Upside of Error and Counterintuitive Wisdom

  1. Obliquity, John Kay

  2. Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio

  3. Ignorance, Stewart Firestein

  4. Failure, Stewart Firestein

  5. The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, McArdle

  6. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Schulz

  7. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs, Morton Meyers

  8. The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner

  9. Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson

  10. Learning from My Success and From Others’ Failure

History and Evolution of Science

  1. The Invention of Science, David Wootton

  2. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, Butterfield

  3. A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900, Charles Singer

  4. Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

  5. From X-Rays to Quarks, Emilio Segre

  6. From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves, Emilio Segre

  7. The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Scerri

  8. A History of Science, John Gribbin

  9. The Search for the Elements, Isaac Asimov

  10. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn

  11. The Great Rift, Michael E. Hobart

  12. To Explain the World, Stephen Weinberg

  13. Science: The Glorious Entertainment, Jacques Barzun

  14. https://www.vandammeacademy.com/science-courses

Creativity, Flow, Habits, Performance Optimisation and Deep Work

  1. Deep Work, Cal Newport

  2. Peak, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

  3. Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  4. Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  5. The Talent Code, Diane Coyle

  6. Atomic Habits, James Clear

  7. The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzskin

  8. The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler

  9. Chase, Chance and Creativity, James Austin

  10. The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin

Writing, Reading & Storytelling

  1. The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

  2. Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, Mark Garvey

  3. Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them, John Yorke

  4. The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker

  5. How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren

  6. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

  7. Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath

  8. Save the Cat, Blake Snyder

  9. Working, Robert Caro

  10. Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

  11. The Random House Handbook, Frederick Crews (Fifth Edition)

  12. Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, Oliver Kamm

  13. Clear and Simple as the Truth, Thomas & Turner

  14. The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective, George D. Gopen

  15. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs

  16. Draft No.4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee

  17. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard

  18. How to Take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens

The Risks of Reading

  1. https://andymatuschak.org/books/

  2. http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEESchopenReadingTable.pdf

History of Money and Banking

  1. A Financial History of Western Europe, Charles Kindleberger

  2. Fragile by Design, Charles Calomiris & Stephen Haber

  3. Money, Whence It Came, Where It Went , J.K. Galbraith

  4. Breaking the Bank: The Decline of Bank of America

  5. Golden Fetters, Barry Eichengreen

  6. The Origins of Value, William Goetzmann

  7. A History of Interest Rates, Homer & Sylla

  8. Paper Promises, Philip Coggan

  9. A History of Money and Banking in the United States, Murray Rothbard

  10. Lombard Street, Walter Bagehot

  11. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op234~ed52941e3b.en.pdf

The Fed and Central Banking

  1. History of The Fed, Allan Melzer

  2. Deliberating American Monetary Policy, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bail & Andrew Bailey

  3. The Alchemists, Neil Irwin

  4. The Man Who Knew, Sebastian Mallaby

  5. The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin

  6. Greenspan’s Bubbles, Bill Fleckenstein

Financial Bubbles, Manias and Crises

  1. Crashed, Adam Tooze

  2. FDIC Report (Stanford Law site includes recordings of all interviews)

  3. Levin Report

  4. Short History of Financial Euphoria – Galbraith

  5. Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller

  6. This Time is Different, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

  7. Manias Panics and Crashes, Charles Kindleberger

  8. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay

  9. Tulipmania, Anne Goldgar

  10. Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor

  11. The Panic of 1907, Robert Bruner

  12. When Money Dies, Adam Fergusson

  13. The Great Crash, J.K. Galbraith

  14. When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein

  15. Famous Financial Fiascos, John Train

Physics & Physicists

  1. The Physicists: A Generation that Changed the World , C.P. Snow

  2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

  3. Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field, Nancy Forbes

  4. Six Easy Pieces: Fundamentals of Physics Explained, Richard Feynman

  5. The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin

  6. Physics and Beyond, Werner Heisenberg

  7. Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines, Richard Muller

  8. Fundamentals of Physics , David Resnick

  9. The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Atkins

  10. Physics: Principles with Applications, Douglas Giancoli

  11. The Evolution of Physics, Albert Einstein

  12. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, Graham Farmelo

  13. The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, David Schwartz

  14. Rutherford: Simple Genius, David Wilson

  15. The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

  16. https://quantum.country/qcvc

The Atomic Bomb

  1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

  2. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes

  3. The Physics of the Manhattan Project, B. Cameron Reed

  4. Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, Lillian Hoddeston, Paul Henrikson

  5. Racing the Enemy, Tsoyushi Hasegawa

  6. Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Project 1942-52, Anne Fitzpatrick

  7. Building the H-Bomb: A Personal History: Kenneth W. Ford

  8. U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, Chuck Hansen

  9. Carey Sublette's nuclear weapons FAQ: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

  10. Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (vol.2), Richard Hewlett

  11. The Nuclear Express, Thomas Reed: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation & Danny Stillman

  12. Command and Control, Eric Schlosser

  13. The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb, Herbert York

  14. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Samuel Glasstone

  15. Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy, Alex Wellerstein

  16. Atomic Audit: The Costs & Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, Stephen Schwartz

  17. Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, Ward Hayes Wilson

  18. The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg

  19. Now It Can Be Told, Leslie Groves

History of Economic Thought

  1. The Assumptions Economists Make, Jonathan Schlefer

  2. Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets & the Empirical Tradition in Economics, Robert and Enid Fogel

  3. The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

  4. A Brief but Affectionate History of GDP, Diane Coyle

  5. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Murray Rothbard

  6. Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste, Philip Mirowski

  7. History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter

  8. Growth of Economic Thought, Henry Spiegel

  9. The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber

  10. A History of Economics, J.K. Galbraith

  11. The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner

  12. Grand Pursuit, Sylvia Nasar

  13. The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber

DNA, Life, Evolution & The Origins of Everything

  1. Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing, Kevin Davies

  2. Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich

  3. The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee

  4. Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life, Adam Rutherford

  5. The Vital Question, Nick Lane

  6. What Is Life?, Erwin Schrodinger

  7. The Origins of Life, John Maynard Smith

  8. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Janet Browne

  9. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Janet Browne

  10. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett

  11. Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod

  12. The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell

  13. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferriss

  14. Our Cosmic Origins, Paul Dejillas

  15. The Emergence of Life on Earth, Iris Fry

  16. You Are Here, Christopher Potter

  17. Creation, Adam Rutherford

  18. Life’s Ratchet, Peter Hoffman

  19. The Double Helix, James Watson

  20. Genome, Matt Ridley

  21. The Beak of the Finch, Johnathan Weiner

  22. Evolution Now, John Maynard Smith

  23. The Theory of Evolution, John Maynard Smith

  24. Life: An Unauthorized Biography, Richard Fortey

  25. Origin Story, David Christian

  26. The Path to the Double Helix, Robert Olby

  27. How to Make a Human Being, Christopher Potter

  28. The Molecular Biology of the Cell, Bruce Alberts et. al.

  29. Mendel’s Demon, Mark Ridley

  30. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey Smith

Best Books About Countries and Regions (h/t Marginal Revolution)

  1. The New Spaniards, John Hopper

  2. The Discovery of France, Graham Robb

  3. The German Genius, Peter Watson

  4. The Italians, Luigi Barzini

  5. The Portugese, A Modern History, Barry Hatton

  6. Ireland: A History, Thomas Bartlett

  7. Russia and the Russians, Geoffrey Hosking

  8. The Gates of Europe, A History of Ukraine

  9. The English and Their History, Robert Tombs

  10. Island People: The Caribbean and the World, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

  11. Hun-Sen’s Cambodia, Sebastian Strangio

  12. In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, Edward Luce

  13. Pakistan: A Hard Country, Anatol Lieven

  14. Crossroads: A Popular History of Singapore and Malaysia, Jim Baker

  15. Lost Japan, Alex Kerr

  16. How Asia Works, Joe Studwell

  17. A Penguin History of New Zealand, Michael King

  18. Why Switzerland?, Jonathan Steinberg

  19. Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power, Michael Reid

  20. Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture, Donald Levine

  21. Korea: The Impossible Country, Daniel Tudor

  22. Distant Neighbours: A Portrait of the Mexicans, Alan Riding

  23. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaj

  24. Indonesia, etc., Elizabeth Pisani

  25. Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkish World, Hugh Pope

  26. Netherlands: The Low Sky: Understanding the Dutch, Han van der Horst

  27. Guyana: Wild Coast, John Gimlette

  28. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding, Robert Hughes

  29. Forgotten Continent, Michael Reid

  30. The Debatable Land, Graham Robb

  31. In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, Michela Wrong

  32. Patriot Game: Canada And The Canadian Question, Peter Brimelow

  33. Poland: God’s Playground, Norman Davies

  34. Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, Mary Heimann

  35. China: Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos

Thinking, Consciousness and The Brain

  1. Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett

  2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

  3. Mapping the Mind, Rita Carter

  4. The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux

  5. Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran

  6. Descarte’s Error, Antonio Damasio

  7. Consciousness: An Introduction, Susan Blackmore

  8. Incognito, David Eagleman

  9. A History of the Mind, Nicholas Humphrey

  10. Evolving the Mind, A.G. Cairns Smith

  11. Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett

  12. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Intuition, Michael Mauboussin

  13. The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner

The Categorisation, Storage and Transmission of Knowledge & Information

  1. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Ann Blair

  2. The Book, Keith Houston

  3. The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester

  4. Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Alex Wright

  5. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Alex Wright

  6. The Information, James Gleick

  7. MP3, The Meaning of a Format, Jonathan Sterne

  8. Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole

  9. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Geoffrey C. Bowker

Sante Fe & Complexity

  1. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, Eric Schneider

  2. Evolution, Thermodynamics and Information, Jeffrey Wicken

  3. The Nature of Value, Gogerty

  4. Why Information Grows, Hidalgo (see also this thrilling talk)

  5. Order Out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine

  6. The Demon in the Machine, Paul Davies

  7. Unravelling Complexity: The Life and Work of Gregory Chaitin, ed. Shayam Wuppuluri & Francisco Doria

  8. The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker

  9. Hidden Order, John Holland

  10. At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman

  11. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, Eric Chaisson

Maths, Probability, Markets and Risk

  1. Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, Morris Kline

  2. Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the History of the Universe, Steven Strogatz

  3. Calculus Made Easy, Silvanus Thompson

  4. The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics , Edna Kramer

  5. The Main Stream of Mathematics, Edna Kramer

  6. Men of Mathematics, E.T. Bell

  7. A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy

  8. 17 Equations That Changed the World, Ian Stewart

  9. The Calculus Story, David Acheson

  10. Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein

  11. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates

  12. A Demon of Our Own Design, Richard Bookstaber

  13. The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber

  14. Who Gets What, And Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, Alvin Roth

  15. Elements of Euclid (Illustrated for ease of comprehension)

Beatles Books & Rock Biographies as the Best Management Books (h/t Tyler Cowen)

  1. Tune In (All These Years, pt.1), Marc Lewisohn

  2. Revolution in the Head, Ian Macdonald

  3. You Never Give Me Your Money, Pete Doggett

  4. Dreaming the Beatles, Rob Sheffield

  5. The Complete Beatles Chronicle, Mark Lewisohn

  6. Bring It On Home: The Story of Rock's Greatest Manager, Mark Blake

  7. The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, The Sequel, Johnny Rogan

Additional Categories to Add

  1. Books about best hiring practices

  2. Books about building an organisation

  3. Books about successful research organisations

  4. Great management books

  5. Great biographies

  6. Political history / theory

  7. Globalisation / Trade / Shipping

  8. Religion

  9. Happiness / Stoicism

  10. Big Infrastructure

  11. Great essays & essayists

  12. Philosophy

Fun and/or Interesting PDFs

  1. https://fermatslibrary.com/s/scientific-aspects-of-juggling#email-newsletter

  2. https://zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/what-is-amazon/

  3. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

  4. https://fs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Naval-Ravikant-TKP.pdf

  5. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/firbush/hamming.pdf

  6. https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/InvestinginUnknownandUnknowable.pdf

  7. http://blas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/On-Paul-Graham-2.pdf

  8. https://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf

  9. http://aquaticcommons.org/9699/1/mfr7023.pdf

  10. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf