SECTION · 40 ARTICLES
Book summaries of best-sellers and classics: the key ideas in five minutes, which of the book's claims hold up against the research, and how to put the useful parts to work.
BACKGROUND · GEORGES DE LA TOUR, THE PENITENT MAGDALEN, C. 1640 · THE MET, OPEN ACCESS
BOOKS · 10 MIN · 8 POINTS
Newport's idea is a filter, not a detox: spend your online time on a few carefully chosen activities that support what you value, and "happily miss out on everything else". He suggests starting with a 30-day break from optional technologies.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 10 POINTS
Factfulness argues that most of us carry an out-of-date, too-gloomy picture of the world. It names ten instincts, such as the urge to see two opposed groups or to fear what is frightening rather than what is risky, that keep it that way.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 8 POINTS
Taleb's rule is symmetry: whoever takes the upside of a decision should also carry its downside. The book applies it to advisers, bankers, policymakers, experts and anyone who tells others what to do.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 7 POINTS
Carr argues that the internet is changing how we think, not just what we read. In his account, a medium built on links, alerts and quick hits trains attention to scatter, and a brain that keeps reshaping itself with use goes along with it.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 8 POINTS
Postman argues that the form of a medium shapes what can be said through it. Television, he says, turned news, politics, religion and teaching into entertainment. He set the book against Huxley's Brave New World rather than Orwell's 1984.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 9 POINTS
Sagan argues that science is a way of thinking, not just a body of facts, and that a public without that habit is easy prey for pseudoscience and superstition.
BOOKS · 6 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: James Allen's short 1903 book argues that thought shapes character, circumstances and even health: "A man is literally what he thinks".
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: small actions repeated every day add up, and the way to keep them going is to change the system around you (cues, surroundings, how easy the first step is) rather than rely on willpower.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: the ability to focus without distraction on hard thinking work is becoming rarer just as it becomes more valuable, Newport argues, and it can be trained with four rules: work deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media and drain the shallows.
BOOKS · 6 MIN · 7 POINTS
The core idea: do fewer things, better. McKeown calls it "the disciplined pursuit of less": decide what matters most, cut most of the rest, and make the important work easier to do.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: Levitt and Dubner use data to look for the incentives hidden behind everyday behaviour, from schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers to estate agents and a street gang. The book has no single thesis; it is a set of stories built on research, much of it Levitt's own papers.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 6 POINTS
The core idea: get every commitment out of your head and into a system you trust, decide the very next physical action for each one, and look over the whole system regularly, so your mind is free to deal with what is in front of you.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 7 POINTS
The core idea: what people achieve depends less on talent than we assume and more on grit, which Duckworth defines as passion and perseverance for long-term goals; she argues effort counts twice, once in building skill and again in using it.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 7 POINTS
The core idea: see things from the other person's side. The book turns that into 30 principles in four parts, drawn from the adult classes Dale Carnegie ran in New York.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: Cialdini argues that people often say yes on a single cue rather than after weighing everything, and that persuaders lean on six such cues: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. The 2021 edition adds a seventh, unity.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 10 POINTS
What it is: the 124 surviving letters that Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius in the last years of his life (62–65). The English title Letters from a Stoic comes from Robin Campbell's 1969 Penguin selection, not from Seneca.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, argues that the search for meaning, not pleasure, is the main thing that drives people, and that even when almost everything is taken away, the attitude a person takes remains their own.
BOOKS · 10 MIN · 12 POINTS
The core idea: these are notes the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, probably in the 170s AD and at least partly on campaign. He keeps coming back to a few thoughts: our judgements, not events, are what disturb us; our own actions are what we control; other people are kin; death and change are part of nature.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 6 POINTS
The core idea: people differ in whether they see ability as fixed or as something that grows with effort, good strategies and help from others, and, the book argues, that belief shapes how they meet challenges and setbacks.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: Thaler and Sunstein argue that no choice is ever presented in a neutral way, so whoever designs it can steer people towards better options without banning anything or changing their incentives much. They call such a design a nudge, and the stance behind it libertarian paternalism. The 2021 Final Edition adds a chapter on "sludge", the friction that makes good choices harder.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: negotiation runs on emotion more than logic, so Voss builds his method on listening: mirroring, naming the other person's feelings, inviting a "no", and asking open "how" and "what" questions.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: Cain argues that American culture prizes an "Extrovert Ideal" of the bold, sociable self, and that schools and workplaces built around it waste the strengths of quieter people.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 7 POINTS
The core idea: Gladwell argues that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little to where they come from: when they were born, their culture, their family and the chances they had to practise. In his words, "achievement is talent plus preparation".
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: Epstein argues that in most fields, and especially complex and unpredictable ones, people who sample widely and specialise later do well, and that an early head start pays off most in narrow, rule-bound activities such as chess and golf.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 7 POINTS
The core idea: Harari argues that Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet because it can cooperate flexibly in huge numbers, held together by stories that exist only in shared imagination: gods, nations, money, laws and companies. He tells it through three revolutions: cognitive, agricultural and scientific.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 11 POINTS
The core idea: Emerson's 1841 essay asks readers to trust their own thinking over custom, crowds and even their own past words: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
BOOKS · 6 MIN · 9 POINTS
The core idea: the leaders and organisations that inspire people communicate from the inside out, starting with why they exist (their purpose or belief), then how they work, then what they make. People, Sinek argues, commit to the why more than to the product.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: measure work by what it buys you in time, not only in money. Ferriss sets out a four-step plan, DEAL (definition, elimination, automation, liberation): decide what you want, cut low-value work, hand off or automate the rest, and free yourself from one fixed place.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 10 POINTS
The book is a framework of principles, not a research report: seven habits that move from managing yourself to working with others, plus renewal, built on what Covey called the character ethic.
BOOKS · 6 MIN · 11 POINTS
The core idea: Franklin's unfinished memoir tells how a runaway printer's apprentice built a business, a reputation and a string of public projects, and sets out the method he credited for it: 13 virtues, practised one a week and checked on a daily chart.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 10 POINTS
What it is: a short Chinese book on strategy in 13 chapters, traditionally credited to Sun Wu, known as Sun Tzu ("Master Sun"), a general of the late 6th century BC. Who wrote it, and when, has been debated for centuries; one modern view is that a 5th-century core was revised later, in the Warring States period.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 12 POINTS
The core idea: a short handbook of the teaching of Epictetus, a Stoic teacher who had once been enslaved, put together, on the usual account, by his student Arrian. It opens by splitting the world in two: what is within our power (opinion, aim, desire, aversion) and what is not (body, property, reputation, office).
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: Ries treats a new venture as an experiment run under extreme uncertainty. Instead of executing a detailed plan, a team builds a minimum viable product, measures how real customers respond, and learns whether to pivot or persevere. Progress is counted in what the team learns, not in what it ships.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 10 POINTS
The core idea: a habit is a loop of cue, routine and reward, and the reliable way to change one, Duhigg argues, is to keep the cue and the reward and swap in a new routine.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 11 POINTS
The core idea: The Prince is a short guide to how rulers, above all new ones, win power, keep it and lose it. Machiavelli says he will follow how things are done rather than how they ought to be done.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 11 POINTS
The core idea: doing well with money depends more on behaviour (patience, room for error, knowing when you have enough) than on how much you know. Housel makes the case in short chapters built on stories, not formulas.
BOOKS · 8 MIN · 8 POINTS
The core idea: the ability to rethink and unlearn may matter more than raw intelligence. Grant argues that we slip into the habits of preachers, prosecutors and politicians, and would do better to think like scientists: treat our views as hypotheses and update them when the evidence changes.
BOOKS · 9 MIN · 12 POINTS
The book describes two ways of thinking, fast and automatic (System 1) and slow and effortful (System 2). Kahneman presents them as a metaphor.
BOOKS · 7 MIN · 11 POINTS
The core idea: Thoreau went to live by Walden Pond, in his words, because he "wished to live deliberately": to work out what a life really needs and what everything else costs, measured in what he called "life" rather than in dollars.
BOOKS · 11 MIN · 10 POINTS
The core idea: Walker argues that sleep supports nearly everything the brain and body do, from memory to immune defences, and that many adults get too little. Parts of that core hold up well: lab studies find that steady short sleep impairs attention and performance, and sleep helps memory, though by less than once thought.
