Reading

I started reading in fifth grade. I was curious but I had no guidance—I didn’t know what to read. I would read encyclopedias, just trying to absorb information about a world I didn’t understand. Why are people doing this or that? What am I supposed to be doing and why? How come everyone seems to know what they should be doing and I didn’t? The books came later. They came without a map, without a syllabus, without anyone telling me what was next. I followed the thread wherever it pulled me.

It started with Jules Verne—in Czech. A classmate recommended him to me, and since I had been staring at encyclopedias, it was a step forward. I read Cesta do středu Země (Journey to the Center of the Earth), Ze Země na Měsíc (From the Earth to the Moon), Dvacet tisíc mil pod mořem (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). Ze Země na Měsíc felt kind of ridiculous—they basically shoot a person inside a bullet to the moon. And Cesta do středu Země (Journey to the Center of the Earth) was a trip into caves that happened to slope downward, with no appreciation that it would get hot, that there would be lava. Just a staircase into the center of the Earth.

And yet. The notion that you could just do it—ridiculous as it sounds—was thinking outside the box. It was original, free of all constraints, existing in its own dimension where something that absurd felt completely normal. A bit like mathematics, in a way I wouldn’t understand until much later. I had come up with plenty of silly ideas in my life, as everyone does, but I had never thought of shooting someone to the moon. That kind of unconstrained imagination was new to me.

But there was something else. I was getting to know the characters more intimately than I had ever known a living person. I saw inside their heads. I was observing them—a little bit like a creep, except this is a socially accepted activity, so it didn’t feel that way. But that’s what it is, isn’t it? A reality show, except entirely made up—which, really, reality shows are too. My later reading of philosophy would be deductive—learn a theory, deduce applications. But reading stories like Verne was inductive. Things happened, and I got to find patterns in the characters’ behavior, thoughts, and feelings. Instead of reading about theories, I got to create my own theories directly from data—simulated data, but data nonetheless. I liked realistic fiction for exactly this reason.

Then I transferred to gymnázium, and everything changed. Our history teacher taught the subject the way it should be taught—as a story, not a list of dates. I fell in love with Vojtěch Zamarovský’s Řecký zázrak (The Greek Miracle), a book that told the history of Greece as narrative. I don’t know to what extent Zamarovský was rigorous as a scholar, but it wasn’t fiction either. It was the book that made me want to go to the sources.

So I did. I read Herodotus’ Histories. Then Thucydides—his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, a book that reads like a manual on how civilizations destroy themselves. Then Polybius’ Histories. Then Arrian’s history of Alexander the Great. I was fifteen, reading ancient military campaigns in Czech translation, and I couldn’t stop.

From Greece I moved to Rome—Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War and Commentaries on the Civil War, Zamarovský’s Dějiny psané Římem (History Written by Rome), Michael Grant’s Dějiny antického Říma (History of Ancient Rome) in Czech translation, and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I tried philosophy. I read Plato’s dialogues—most importantly The Republic and The Laws. I never made it through Aristotle. He was too dense for me at the time. I should probably try again.

I also loved Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Životopisy slavných Řeků a Římanů). Surprisingly readable—I was struck by how accessible some of these ancient authors were. I loved how logical they were, how ambitious, daring, curious. When I saw Plutarch juxtaposing Greeks and Romans—comparing individuals across two different civilizations—I was fascinated. I would never have thought to do that. I was excited to read these stories, though I have to admit: at the time, I wasn’t thinking critically. I was absorbing.

The questions came later, and they were the questions the histories never quite answered. Why could Rome lose three armies to Hannibal and still win the war, while in the late Empire a single defeat against the Parthians meant losing a war? There were vague references to corruption—but what exactly was corruption? Weren’t people about equally greedy in all periods? The same puzzle applied to Byzantium: Justinian’s reconquista under Belisarius—I read Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius—and then centuries of decline, held together by Greek fire and the walls of Constantinople. When Mehmed II finally punched through those walls, I wondered: why didn’t the Byzantines have the same cannons? How did peoples from the steppe overcome a thousand-year-old civilization? How did the Turks succeed where the Arabs had failed? The explicit discussion of class struggle between the populares and optimates in ancient Rome also struck me—that kind of transparent analysis of power wasn’t common in Czech discourse at the time.

Much later—more than twenty years later—I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies and encountered his argument that Plato was essentially a proto-fascist. It shocked me. When I had read The Republic and The Laws in high school, I had thought: what nonsense, no state would actually have these rules—children not knowing their parents, all of it. And then Popper opened my eyes to the fact that much of it was modeled on the Spartan social system. It had been real. I had dismissed it as fantasy because I lacked the context to see it as a blueprint.

But it was the Stoics who changed something. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (Hovory k sobě in Czech) and Epictetus’ Enchiridion (Ruko­jeť — Rozpravy). I loved them because I had never had a framework for personal decisions. I didn’t know the word “framework” back then, or the role it plays in rational action, but I had an implicit thirst for one. My mother’s decision process felt arbitrary, and frankly so did everyone else’s. People didn’t need good reasons for what they did. They seemed inconsistent, acting on impulse, whim, performance. Stoicism gave me a north star. But more than that, it told me that people had been thinking deeply about why they do what they do—two thousand years ago—even if the living people around me didn’t seem to. Everyone kept telling me I was overthinking everything. To me it felt more like they were underthinking everything.

With the Stoics, unlike the histories, there was a feedback loop between theory and practice. I could apply what I read to real decisions, run into problems, think about those problems, and when I couldn’t figure it out, go back to the text. The historical reading was absorption. The philosophical reading was conversation.

Parallel to the ancient world, there was another education happening. I would go to the National Technical Library—then housed near Klementinum in the center of Prague—and read PC Magazine and Chip, the two most important technology magazines available in Czech. I read about HTML, PHP, CSS. I tried to learn C, C++, Java, but at the time I didn’t understand what they were for. I had no guidance. Our computer science class in gymnázium barely covered MS Word and Excel.

Still, I felt privileged. These libraries gave me access that I considered the highest privilege possible. This was before Google. AltaVista and Yahoo were the maps of the internet. I didn’t have internet at home, so I would go to the library and reserve time by the hour—one hour per week was the limit. If the slots were full, I would put myself on the backup list and sit around waiting. I set up my first email on post.cz and had no idea what it was for. No one I knew had email. I got some friends to set up accounts and we started sending each other messages, marveling at the fact that it worked at all.

Around the same time, I fell in love with Linux. I read Mark G. Sobell’s Linux — Praktický průvodce (Linux: A Practical Guide), Linux in a Nutshell by Andy Oram and Ellen Siever, the Linux Documentation Project book, Linux — Začínáme programovat (Linux: Beginning to Program, a translation of Neil Matthew and Richard Stones), and Správa operačního systému Linux (Linux System Administration) by Roderick W. Smith and Vicki Stanfield. I would try to install SuSE Linux on our family computer, which drove my brother crazy—I couldn’t get half the hardware working, and he needed Windows for gaming and Office. The CD burner wouldn’t work under SuSE. Dual boot was a constant negotiation.

But everything about Linux was a revelation. So many choices to make—KDE vs. GNOME (I loved GNOME), so many text editors (I eventually learned Vim, which became my go-to for coding), so many shells (bash, zsh). I tried RedHat, Mandrake, even Slackware. I tried Wine for gaming with no success—all that OpenGL graphics card configuration. One really had to understand computers to set up a Linux system. Windows hid all that complexity. Linux opened it up. It introduced me to problems and choices I didn’t know existed, and in doing so it taught me how computers actually work. I loved the open source spirit and ideology—the idea that knowledge should be shared, that tools should be free, that a community of strangers could build something better than a corporation. Today I mostly use Ubuntu, and I am grateful that macOS is built on UNIX—I get the terminal I love inside an ecosystem that connects everything else.

By the time I got to college, everything had changed. A friend started a school magazine and I designed the website for it—a content management system in PHP and MySQL where articles were stored and retrieved dynamically. I also built the school’s official website. The kid who had been reading PC Magazine at the library was now building the things he had read about.

The ancient world kept pulling me forward. Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars—biographies written with the sensibility of a gossip columnist and the access of an archivist. Titus Livius and his history of Rome, a source you learn to read with one eyebrow raised. Ammianus Marcellinus. A book about Attila. Dějiny Byzance (History of Byzantium) from Academia. A book about Eugène of Savoy. Napoleon byl zavražděn (Napoleon Was Murdered)—the case that Napoleon was slowly poisoned on Saint Helena.

In Czech literature, I loved Zikmund Winter’s Mistr Kampanus—a novel set in Prague during the Thirty Years’ War that captures the impossible choices of living under occupation. It stayed with me.

I read most of Paulo Coelho’s books—all except the last three or so. He started repeating himself, and once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. But the early ones mattered at the time.

Balzac’s short stories—we had a Czech edition at home called Povídky (Short Stories), a collection that included the story of Gobseck, the moneylender. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—I read it and then saw it performed in theater. Some books are complete on the page. That one needed a stage.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude confirmed what I had discovered with Verne: fiction is not an escape from understanding but a different route to it. Psychology books describe the theory. A novel like García Márquez’s lets you see it play out—watch characters make decisions, repeat mistakes across generations, love badly, love well. The book was loads of fun, wildly engaging, but what stayed with me was how deeply I got to know the Buendía family. Better, honestly, than most people I have met in real life. That same inductive pleasure from Verne, but richer, stranger, and more human.

And then Ludwig von Mises’ Liberalismus, in Czech translation. I was so taken with it that I gave a presentation on liberalism to my class. That was probably the first time I stood in front of a room and argued for an idea. It would not be the last.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man arrived somewhere in this period—a book that felt like it explained the world I had grown up in, the post-1989 optimism, the sense that something had been settled.

When I got to college, I didn’t have time for books anymore. The classes were engrossing enough. But in one of them we were assigned F. A. Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society, published in the American Economic Review, and something shifted.

I loved the font of the AER. It felt so serious, so grave—almost like being in a church. I was privy to printed word that distilled so much knowledge into so short a piece of writing. I felt like I needed to scrutinize every sentence, that every sentence carried deep meaning. It felt like holding a religious relic. And I loved the content too. I loved what it represented. While many people were busy discussing what is fair and what is not, here was Hayek in the 1940s asking whether this or that was even feasible. Twenty years later, reading Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, I would learn that the Soviets effectively realized their ideas were impractical before Lenin even died. The New Economic Policy was an admission that they had no economic programme at all. But I only connected those dots in 2024.

I was also learning English with more intensity than ever before. I had paper flashcards—experimenting with individual words on each card versus whole sentences for context. I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s more than twenty times. Training Day with Denzel Washington around five. This was before streaming, before Napster. I was reading The Economist cover to cover, learning the language of argument and evidence at the same time. My programme required two foreign languages, so I picked up Italian too. The reading never stopped—it just changed medium.

Graduate school hit like a wall. Real analysis in the first quarter—I had never seen anything like it. The undergraduate economics textbooks—Gravelle and Rees, Mankiw, Obstfeld, Blanchard—had been demanding but navigable. Real analysis was a different animal.

To understand why, I have to go back further. Something had always bothered me in school. I didn’t do particularly well in high school physics because what we were doing, I later learned, was called handwaving. We were learning a simplified model of something—focused on certain aspects that were logically put together while ignoring other things that didn’t make sense, that were inconsistent with the model. Reality and the model didn’t quite map neatly onto each other. In the main aspects they did, and that was supposed to be the point, but our teachers never explicitly said so. They simply said: learn this, and don’t annoy me too much with bothersome questions. A bit like in Young Sheldon—when you dig too deep, you end up annoying your teacher and your classmates, because if you dig deeper you signal that the teacher can push more onto you, and a typical Czech high school student’s default position was to resist anything that wasn’t deemed absolutely necessary. Which makes sense, given the mandatory nature and the enforcement approach to instruction at that level.

Descriptive subjects like geography or biology were fine. But a subject like physics is trying to describe mechanisms, and the models are always imperfect. Only in college was I exposed to the explicit dictum that models are not supposed to be perfect or true—only useful tools to predict the future or conceptualize reality. That reality is in any case too complicated to model perfectly, so all we can do is form some sort of compromise between truth and model simplicity, because our primate brains cannot handle the full complexity of reality anyway. It had always bothered me, and only in college was it explicitly explained that this is an intentional choice—that perfection is impossible, not even a goal, and that none of the models will make complete sense. At least I understood why, and so I made my peace with it. Economic models, of course, are quite often ridiculously basic.

But mathematics is different from all the other sciences. A science like physics is trying to model reality and always falls short. Mathematics doesn’t bother itself with reality at all. Models are not the means—they are the destination. Mathematics lives in its own world and is unbothered by the fact that this world resembles reality very little. Sometimes it’s not even obvious how some mathematical topics relate to the real world. And because of this unashamed, willful independence, mathematics delineates for itself a world in which absolute perfection is not only possible but instilled in everyone exposed to it as if by a drill sergeant. Perfection becomes a habit of the field, something taken for granted, a foundation for any sort of work. Perfection is sine qua non in mathematics.

Every dot, every comma, every letter has its place. Every single sentence carries meaning. There is no padding, no exaggeration, no subtlety, no cryptic expressions like we sometimes see in philosophy—where people have endless debates about what this or that philosopher meant by “everything is always in motion” (Heraclitus) or “nothing changes” (Parmenides). In mathematics, a single sentence sometimes expresses what in writing would take many pages. You can’t skip over it, can’t skim, can’t get the big picture and fill in the details later. You have to advance painstakingly, sentence by sentence, and the less you understand the previous sentence, the lesser the chance you will understand the next one. You cannot outrun your own headlights.

Mathematics instills exactitude, patience, intentionality, depth. But there is something else. Most of the time in mathematics, one finds oneself in a state of not understanding. Once you understand something, you move on—to the next thing you don’t understand. So you spend most of your time in a state of knowing ignorance, and that is a very difficult state to be in emotionally. The brain is grasping at straws. It prefers to lull itself into believing it understands the world, because then it feels safe. To do mathematics, you have to be brave enough to endure this torture of admitted ignorance—to run against the cold winter wind, to fight against quicksand. Real analysis was a whole different animal. But the reason it was different deserves more than a passing line.

And that is precisely the point of mathematical instruction in an undergraduate economics programme like the one I did. Mathematics provides the exacting foundation with which one approaches everything else. Microeconomics builds on mathematics. Good macroeconomics builds on microeconomics. And real-world topics are really applied micro or macro. It is a pyramid—and the books that sit on top only matter because the foundations hold them up.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States sits near the top of that pyramid. It was my introduction to America as seen from below. But I could only have a critical conversation with it—rather than simply absorbing it, becoming imprinted with Zinn’s thinking—because the analytical foundations were already in place. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed reframed education itself: not as transmission but as dialogue, not as domestication but as liberation. These books didn’t change my politics so much as sharpen the questions I was already asking.

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee gave me a framework for thinking about why civilizations diverge—geography, ecology, accident. It was the kind of explanation I had been groping toward ever since I wondered why Rome could absorb Cannae but not Adrianople.

Then came the economists who changed how I think about institutions. Ronald Coase’s The Nature of the Firm asked the simplest question: if markets are so efficient, why do firms exist? His answer—transaction costs—opened a door. Oliver Williamson walked through it, showing how firms are islands of cooperation in a sea of market exchange, and that the boundaries between firm and market are endogenous to the costs of contracting. Yoram Barzel took it further. His Economic Analysis of Property Rights and A Theory of the State showed me that property rights are not given by law but emerge from the costs of measurement and enforcement. The state itself becomes explicable—not as a social contract or a monopoly on violence, but as an institution that lowers the costs of delineating and protecting rights. Reading Barzel felt like the moment in high school when the Stoics gave me a framework for personal decisions—except now it was a framework for understanding why institutions look the way they do.

There is a pattern I’ve noticed in how understanding develops. At first, things feel simple—you learn the basics and the world seems knowable. Then the more you learn, the more complex the truth appears, until at some point any notion of a pattern disappears entirely. You’re lost. And then, if you keep going, things start to make sense again—not the simple sense of the beginning, but a richer, harder-won sense that accommodates the complexity instead of ignoring it. I think of it as Platonic circles: the circle of knowledge grows, but so does its circumference—the boundary where the known meets the unknown. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. But if you push through, the circles start to overlap, and the intersections are where the real insight lives.

My interest in psychology started in high school. I tried reading Jung’s Duše moderního člověka (The Soul of Modern Man) but it was difficult—I felt there were prerequisites I didn’t have. This was before Google, before ChatGPT. There was no way to quickly fill in the gaps. I read a number of books by Erich Fromm—Umění milovat (The Art of Loving), Mít nebo být? (To Have or to Be?), Strach ze svobody (Escape from Freedom)—and Alfred Adler’s Smysl života (The Meaning of Life). I tried Freud but found him too dense and strange, with all the sex. I was intrigued by psychology but couldn’t find a roadmap.

I found one in graduate school, from an unexpected direction. Economics is built on a very simple conception of the human mind—the calculus of pleasure and pain, fear and greed. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky re-introduced psychology into economics, and that gave me an opportunity to rekindle my interest. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow formalized what I had only intuited: that our cognitive machinery is riddled with systematic biases, shortcuts that served us on the savannah but betray us in the modern world.

From there, the reading accelerated. Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. Desmond Morris’ The Human Zoo—the provocation that modern humans live in conditions as artificial as a zoo, and that much of our dysfunction follows from the mismatch between our evolved nature and our constructed environment. David Brooks’ The Social Animal—the unconscious mind, social cognition, the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are. Daniel Pink’s Drive. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. Susan Cain’s Quiet. Carol Dweck’s Mindset. Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game. Robert Cialdini’s Influence. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Ethan Kross’ Chatter. David J. Lieberman’s Mindreader. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Designing Your Life. Gabriele Oettingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking.

Then the reading deepened into clinical territory and neuroscience. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers. Randolph Nesse’s Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes. Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Pattern Seekers. Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation. James Nestor’s Breath. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson’s Altered Traits.

Through these books I was finally able to transcend the way psychology is conceived in the Czech Republic, where it is still mired in Freudianism and philosophy, and move toward a scientific understanding of the human mind. By linking my earlier interest in Stoicism with what I learned about cognitive behavioral therapy and the neuroscience of meditation, I arrived at a more holistic understanding of myself. This journey is ongoing, but I have good foundations now—and a roadmap for future reading.

In graduate school I was able to pick up where I had left off with Linux and PC Magazine. All the technological revolutions of our time are happening in America—the internet, the dot-com bubble, machine learning, large language models, data science, SpaceX. And I was in the middle of it: Seattle is home to Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing. I even got to work at Amazon, which was enormously exciting—I met very smart people there and learned not only technical skills but a mindset and a worldview. The reading helped me get more out of that experience.

Brad Stone’s The Everything Store and Adam Cohen’s The Perfect Store. Steven Levy’s In the Plex. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age. Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect. James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds—which overlaps with statistics in ways I found satisfying. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood. James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. Edmund Morris’ Edison. Steven Levy’s Hackers. Geoffrey Cain’s Samsung Rising. Adam Fisher’s Valley of Genius. Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk.

I don’t read for the sake of reading. I read to gain knowledge so I can ultimately make a positive contribution. These books—about founders who built things, engineers who solved problems no one thought were solvable, companies that changed how the world works—were not entertainment. They were preparation. In 2024 I founded Frontier Enterprises, a company building AI-powered learning tools grounded in the science of spaced repetition, feedback, and retention. It brings together everything: the computer science from the National Technical Library, the causal inference from the PhD, the data science from Amazon, the understanding of learning from education research. The reading made it possible.

Being in America meant access to the English corpus, and I had been waiting for this moment for years. There are very few books in Czech compared to English. One has to rely on Czech authors or Czech translations of foreign authors, and translations take time—sometimes they never come at all. Czech is a small country. The combined English-speaking world—America, the UK, Canada, Australia—produces a body of writing that dwarfs anything available in Czech. Learning English was my ticket to more knowledge, more exploration, and graduate school was where I finally cashed it in.

After Zinn, the history reading exploded. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Orville Schell and John Delury’s Wealth and Power—about China’s long struggle with modernity. Herbert Bix’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Richard McGregor’s The Party. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money. Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal’s A Concise Economic History of the World. Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition. Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. Andrew Roberts’ The Storm of War. Ron Chernow’s Washington. Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Kevin Starr’s California. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin. Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. Wayne Urban’s American Education: A History. Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth. Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms. Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival.

The reading has not stopped. Right now I am working through Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin, Robert Caro’s The Path to Power and The Power Broker, Roland Lazenby’s Michael Jordan, Tom Nicholas’ VC, William Magnuson’s For Profit, Thomas Schwartz’s Henry Kissinger and American Power, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus, and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve. The list grows faster than I can read it, and I have made my peace with that.

I have always been looking for meaning and wanted to make a positive contribution—as might be deduced from my reading of Frankl and Adler, and from my participation in summer camps and in Grottaglie. When I got into economics, I wanted to steer it in a direction of social benefit. I got interested in development economics, but after reading Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden—and taking a development economics class that confirmed the medicine economists were trying to impose on developing countries really came from a place of total ignorance—I lost interest.

Then in October 2016 I came across an ad for a research assistant at UW’s College of Education, in an organization then called Childcare Quality & Early Learning (CQEL). Some time before that I had read The Economist’s article on early learning and taken note that Obama had talked about it in a State of the Union address. It looked like an opportunity to make a positive contribution while being gainfully employed. I applied and got the job.

This was a whole new area for me, and it immediately inspired a wave of reading. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language. Piaget’s The Language and Thought of the Child. James Heckman’s Giving Kids a Fair Chance. Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé. Lucy Crehan’s Cleverlands. Barbara Beatty’s Preschool Education in America. Angeline Stoll Lillard’s Montessori. Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making. Geneva Gay’s Culturally Responsive Teaching. Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed. And again Wayne Urban’s American Education: A History—because reading the history of something is usually the fastest way to get up to speed on it.

Some of the books I had already read turned out to be relevant in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes, Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Pattern Seekers, and John Donvan and Caren Zucker’s In a Different Key connected neurodiversity to how we think about children’s development. The Hidden History of Head Start filled in the political context. The reading I had done in psychology—Kahneman, Dweck, van der Kolk—suddenly had a second application. The pyramid was paying dividends again.

CQEL—later renamed Cultivate Learning—was headed by Gail Joseph. She also introduced me to David Knight, who had just joined UW’s faculty, and with him I started working on education finance and school segregation. This opened up K–12 territory—a different world from preschool, with a strong fiscal focus. It was around this time that I was motivated to read Wayne Urban’s American Education: A History more carefully, along with Charles Clotfelter’s After Brown and William Owings and Leslie Kaplan’s American Public School Finance. Every new collaboration introduced new questions, and every new question sent me back to the bookshelf.

As I worked at Cultivate Learning with graduate students from the College of Education—and reviewed papers for Early Childhood Research Quarterly—I realized how woefully unprepared many early learning researchers in the United States are to actually do research. In economics, we were strongly pushed to internalize testable implications, falsifiability, the discipline that comes from having to pass mathematical preliminaries. Education graduate students have nothing of the kind. Many papers are really a method looking for a problem. There is an abundance of qualitative studies that could easily have been quantitative if it weren’t for the researcher’s lack of interest in—or comfort with—quantitative methods.

So I wrote a 125-page research manual for junior ECE researchers, covering everything from how to formulate a research question to hypothesis testing, literature reviews, pre-registration, causal inference, mediation analysis, R programming, effect sizes, power analysis, IRB, and journal selection. Some of the graduate students I mentored—like Liu Liu and Yijie Wang, co-authors on my published papers—went on to produce good research as a result.

Writing the manual sent me back to the foundations. Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis. Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Peter Feibelman’s A PhD Is Not Enough! Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong. Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes.

But mentoring also introduced a different problem: how to motivate people I worked with as a leader, without formal authority over them. The only tools I had were giving them something of value, inspiring them, sharing my knowledge, and figuring out a way to make them want to improve. This is where Carol Dweck’s Mindset and Daniel Pink’s Drive were genuinely helpful. I was introduced to Deci and Ryan’s framework of autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and I ended up applying it in the publication where I led a team of scientists: the COVID-19 teacher depression study. The reading and the work were feeding each other.

A confession: given everything I’ve read and everything I try to absorb, and given that it is not possible for me to read everything before I die—not everything worth reading, not even everything I know I would consider worth reading—I should admit that I only watched Hunter × Hunter and Hikaru no Go. I didn’t read them. Still, I want to pause and say what makes them extraordinary.

Hunter × Hunter is infectiously optimistic. I intuitively loved that quality and only later understood why, when I read Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness and Flourish. The main character, Gon, starts as a blank slate of sorts—a kid who grew up in the countryside, running around with not overly restrictive oversight from his aunt, understanding nature more than people. His father left him. But Gon wasn’t angry about it, the way everyone would be. And he didn’t let it defeat him. There is a line—I think from a Woody Harrelson film—that every challenge either defines you, strengthens you, or defeats you. Gon let it do the first two, in the most positive way possible. He set out to be worthy. Not to prove something to his father. To become the best version of himself.

And that is something I have always intuitively felt was my goal. I want to be the best person I can be. I want to grab from life as much as I can. It’s not moral superiority. It’s greed. I love life and I want the most of it. But I don’t want to have things so much as be things. That’s the object of my greed. I want to know things, learn things, try things, taste things, consider things, do things, analyze things. I want to grab life and absorb it with maximum fullness. I am haunted by the possibility that I would leave something on the table—that there are great people I wouldn’t meet, great things I wouldn’t do, great books I wouldn’t read before I die. It gives me a sense of urgency. Impatience.

Hikaru no Go introduced me to the Japanese game of Go and to the idea that mastery is a lifelong pursuit with no ceiling. It captures something rare: the emotional texture of getting better at something difficult, the loneliness of improvement, and the quiet joy of understanding a position that was opaque to you a year ago.

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking changed how I think about the kitchen—not as a place of recipes but as a laboratory of chemical reactions. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab took that scientific mindset and made it practical. Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat gave me the framework: four variables that explain almost everything.

Giulia Enders’ Gut started me down the fermentation path. William Davis’s Super Gut and the Sonnenburgs’ The Good Gut deepened it. Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation is the bible. Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast taught me that the best bread requires the least intervention—just time and attention.

Marion Nestle’s Food Politics and What to Eat, and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and Cooked gave me the systems view: food is not just chemistry, it is policy, economics, ecology, and power.

Then there are the books that trace a single ingredient through history and industry. Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Milk. Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish. David Lebovitz’s The Great Book of Chocolate. Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity—about the fraud and romance of olive oil. Maryn McKenna’s Plucked—the industrial history of chicken. Seth Siegel’s Troubled Water. Each one takes something you consume without thinking and reveals the system behind it.

In graduate school I tried to jog a lot. I suppose it traces back to the Greek concept of kalokagathia—the notion that body and spirit are intertwined and both must be exercised for either to function well. I wanted to be productive and function well. The jogging gave me a runner’s knee. I went to a doctor, they did an X-ray, found nothing, and sent me home. That was the first crack. Then I developed heartburn—same story: visited a doctor, she said “some people are tall, some people have heartburn” and suggested I take omeprazole, a proton pump inhibitor with serious side effects that didn’t address the root cause. Both experiences left me feeling that the American medical system only cares about you if you are dying.

So I started reading to understand the system. Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine explained how we got here—how American medicine became a fragmented, specialist-driven, disease-reactive institution. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood showed what happens when the system’s incentive structure meets Silicon Valley hubris. But the book that crystallized everything was Peter Attia’s Outlive, with its argument that medicine should be about prevention—extending healthspan, not just lifespan. I strongly identified with that. There is so much to do in the world, so much to read, so many things to build. I want to live long enough to do them, and I want to be there in mind to be productive as long as I can.

Around the same time I discovered Andrew Huberman’s podcast, where he discussed the science behind sauna, contrast therapy, the benefits of specific types of exercise, the effect of morning light on circadian rhythms. Huberman is what got me into hiking—his emphasis on light exposure and its effect on the brain made walking outdoors feel like a cognitive investment, not just recreation. I had already read Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s Rest and Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking, and Huberman connected the dots between what those books described experientially and the underlying neuroscience.

I started playing tennis. Developed elbow tendinopathy. My body was giving the first signs of wear and tear, and it motivated me to take better care of it rather than ignore it the way the medical system seemed to prefer. I picked up sauna, contrast therapy, adjusted my diet. At some point Huberman’s podcast episodes didn’t go deep enough, so I started reading the books—often by the guests he invited. Susanna Söberg’s Winter Swimming came from the sauna episode. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep reframed sleep from a passive necessity into an active performance tool.

From there, the reading branched in every direction. Siddhartha Mukherjee became essential: The Emperor of All Maladies is the biography of cancer, The Gene traces the history of heredity from Mendel to CRISPR, and The Song of the Cell goes deeper still—into the fundamental unit of life. Bill Bryson’s The Body gave me the accessible overview. Philipp Dettmer’s Immune did for the immune system what Giulia Enders’ Gut had done for the digestive tract. Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes expanded my understanding of the microbiome beyond the gut books. Christopher Palmer’s Brain Energy connected metabolic health to psychiatric illness in ways I hadn’t imagined. Valter Longo’s The Longevity Diet and Andrew Steele’s Ageless approached the same question—how to slow aging—from nutrition and molecular biology respectively. Benjamin Bikman’s work on insulin resistance, which I encountered through podcasts, added the metabolic lens.

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave was the most ambitious of the lot—a book that starts with a behavior and works backward through every layer of causation: neuroscience, endocrinology, genetics, evolution, culture. Daniel Z. Lieberman’s The Molecule of More focused the lens on dopamine. Jay Dicharry’s Anatomy for Runners was the practical complement to the runner’s knee experience—the biomechanical understanding I wish the doctor had offered. And Benjamin Ehrlich’s The Brain in Search of Itself—a biography of Santiago Ramón y Cajal—reminded me that the entire field of modern neuroscience was built by one obsessive Spaniard with a microscope and a drawing pen.

The health reading is not separate from everything else. It connects to the psychology (Sapolsky, Lembke, Goleman), to the food (Enders, Sonnenburg, Pollan), to the early childhood work (brain development, executive function), and to the personal conviction that taking care of the body is not vanity but infrastructure. I want the machine to run well so I can use it for a long time.

Christopher Clarey’s The Master is the definitive portrait of Roger Federer—not just as a player but as a mind. Rafael Nadal’s Rafa is the other side: what it takes to compete when you believe the other person is more talented than you. Between the two books, you get the full spectrum of what elite performance looks like.

This page will grow. I am always reading something.

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