Rating: 7.1/10. A collection of relatively short essays about classical piano, each approximately 10 pages long, by an American pianist and composer. All these essays are independent, each exploring a different aspect of the subject, and are organized into five distinct sections: The Performer: talks about the role of the performer in interpreting the composer’s…
Category: Topics
Like, Comment, Subscribe by Mark Bergen
Rating: 8.3/10. Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen Book about the history of YouTube, from its inception to the present day, covering its ups and downs, as well as the controversies it faced. As YouTube exploded in popularity, right now hundreds of hours of videos are uploaded every…
Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy
Rating: 8.5/10. Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook by Peter Kazanjy Book about how to do sales from first principles, for the founder of a startup who has never done sales before. The approach to startup sales is different from that of a bigger company, and you should do work that doesn’t scale. Firstly,…
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
Rating: 7.4/10. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris Book about parenting, arguing for the thesis that parents essentially have no effect on how children turn out. Except in cases of extremely severe abuse, parents have no effect on children, after accounting for factors like genetics. Culture…
Machine Learning Engineering on AWS by Joshua Arvin Lat
Rating: 8.0/10. An overview of the AWS services used by machine learning engineers to preprocess training data, train models, and deploy them to production. The book has good coverage of all of the most AWS services with various different options of doing things, such as code vs no-code tools, and server vs serverless deployment options….
Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
Rating: 7.4/10. Fashionopolis: Why What We Wear Matters by Dana Thomas Book about fast fashion and its negative effects. We are used to buying a lot of cheap clothes without thinking too much, but fast fashion has a lot of negative effects on the environment and workers in developing countries. Fashion is very fast-paced and…
Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu
Rating: 7.6/10. Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu Book about the history of the Chinese language during the early 20th century, when China was beginning to modernize, and how the language and writing system coped with the challenges. It starts with Wang Zhao, a scholar who saw the…
Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson
Rating: 8.1/10. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson Book about the book publishing industry, primarily the USA and the UK. Publishers act as middlemen: they purchase content from agents, who represent the business interests of authors; they add value to the process in several ways: by content…
High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the principles of management, written by the former CEO of Intel. It begins with a toy example production process of a restaurant preparing breakfast meals. The first essential principle is to organize the process around the limiting step, which is the step that takes the most time. For instance, in the…
Gone Viking by Bill Arnott
Rating: 7.7/10. This book is a travel diary journal about the Viking world, mostly taking place in locations visited by the Vikings, such as the UK, Iceland, and Scandinavia (although it’s not limited to these places and also describes places that have no connection to the Vikings, like Hawaii, Haida Gwaii, and Italy). The term…
Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Rating: 8.0/10. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost Book about the Atari VCS (later renamed the Atari 2600), the first widely sold home video gaming console. At first, Atari developed the games themselves, but eventually, they created a platform that allowed third-party developers to release games on…
Tax by Design by Institute for Fiscal Studies
Rating: 9.2/10. Tax by Design: The Mirrless Review by Institute for Fiscal Studies Book about the issues that arise in designing tax systems, and a framework to reason about tax design, with a focus on the UK’s system. Over the last 30 years, there has been a disproportionately large increase in the incomes of the…