Books I have read
Personal reading log spanning fiction and nonfiction, organized by genre with works from 1908 to 2026. This list, started in late 2022, is far from complete. I'm sure I've missed some and will again.
Published Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
Posts
Writing on philosophy, technology, civilization, identity, and the small crafts of attention. Newest first, with the archive organized by month.
July 2026
Fairness vs. Prosperity Tradeoff
Distinguishes three types of fairness to argue the equity-growth tradeoff only holds for outcome equality, not opportunity or procedure.
Vacation Length Thresholds
Defines minimum days at destination by travel type and an optimal trip length of 23 days based on transit overhead.
Dreams as Translation Loss
Examines the theory that dreams occur outside space and time and waking recall is a lossy translation back into bodily consciousness.
Hybrid Productivity System
How elements from Franklin Covey, GTD, and Bullet Journal were combined into one personal productivity practice.
Time, Eternity, and Cosmic Machinery
Explores the metaphor of celestial gears grinding eternity into moments, bridging Ptolemaic cosmology, Ezekiel's ophanim, and quantum gravity.
Canopus Survey Great Wheel
A Canopus agent documents Earth's inhabitants cycling through prescribed patterns, unaware of the Great Wheel erasing their collective memory.
UTM Parameter Origins
UTM parameters trace back to Urchin Software's tracking module, later adopted by Google Analytics as an industry standard.
Republic Continuity as Achievement
Argues that the American republic's survival is an active, recurring achievement requiring each generation's recommitment, not inevitable destiny.
Agency Without a Self
Argues that rejecting free will and a unified self clarifies rather than undermines agency, meaning, and life design.
June 2026
Food Industry Demand Rhetoric
Argues that industrial food signal manipulation—like dyeing farmed salmon pink—exposes the "consumer demand" justification as a tautological deception.
Urban Displacement Into Nature
City dwellers relocated to rural Vermont discover the natural world they'd ignored beneath their urban lives.
Relationship Stability Formula
A mathematical model linking relationship stability to communication balance and depth of mutual understanding.
Language, Framing, and Institutional Agency
How attributing agency to organizations and abstractions obscures human accountability and enables manipulation of public reasoning.
Sound Seedlings Playlist
A curated 77-min instrumental playlist structured as a two-crest arc from ambient to downtempo, funk, cinematic, and back.
Founders Debate Republican Failure
Madison, Hamilton, and Adams diagnose faction, deliberative collapse, and executive power as compounding threats to the republic.
Canned Mai Tai vs. the Real Thing
Cutwater's canned Mai Tai uses legal loopholes and flavor substitutes to mimic a cocktail it doesn't actually contain.
Understanding vs. Execution Gap
Explores why grasping what should be done and actually doing it are distinct capacities, and how abundant understanding can counterfeit action.
Little Red Riding Hood Retelling
A Poe-style gothic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood narrated by a traumatized, unreliable protagonist.
Cultivating Animist Perception
Four practical entry paths for developing animism as a perceptual habit, from sustained attention to reciprocal relationships with place.
Mechanism of Semantic Drift
Critiques the "careless speakers" theory of language change, arguing drift is structural and inevitable, not a failure of diligence.
Candy Man's Double Meaning
A childhood misreading of Sammy Davis Jr.'s 1972 hit reveals how cultural context shapes meaning in seemingly innocent songs.
Methods of Inquiry Shape Knowledge
Heisenberg's observer effect extended: all inquiry methods shape what we discover, making knowledge provisional and framework-dependent.
Antifa Defined
Antifa is an anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-worker movement resisting white supremacy, bigotry, and exploitation.
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
Explores 'strong opinions, weakly held'—forming decisive positions while staying open to revision when better evidence emerges.
Embedded in Your Thinking
Examines why cognitive embeddedness cannot be escaped even through awareness, since recognition itself remains inside the thinking it observes.
Optimistic Nihilism vs Nihilistic Optimism
Contrasts optimistic nihilism (freedom from meaninglessness) with nihilistic optimism (choosing positivity despite meaninglessness).
May 2026
Privacy of Mental Habits
Examines the unobserved mental habits and private cognitive routines that shape psychological experience beyond external scrutiny.
Stoic Responses to Suffering
Three Stoic responses to unbearable situations—leave, change, or accept—and why passive endurance is not a valid fourth option.
Paradox of Tolerance
Karl Popper's paradox that tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance to survive.
Mise-en-Place Practices for Knowledge Workers
Four practices adapted from culinary mise-en-place for knowledge workers: strategic task sequencing, completing background work before deep focus, using structural placeholders, and maintaining a clear vision of completion.
Old Man by the River
A short story of a father and son fishing, exploring memory, impermanence, and presence through quiet dialogue.
Democracy Under Pressure
How political stress tests reveal institutional decay and whether the resulting reckoning leads to renewal or mere survival.
Wheel's Turning
Norse mythology frames a meditation on presence, as Óðinn and Bragi debate fate's wheel and the value of the present moment.
Leading vs. Conforming
Leading and conforming are situational modes of action, not fixed personality types; context determines which to choose.
Identity Goals vs. Action Goals
Action-based goals outlast identity-based ones because intrinsic interest in the work sustains effort when motivation fades.
Time Perception by Age
Tables showing how a day, month, and year shrink as a proportion of lived experience from age 10 to 80.
Cost of Knowing
Certain forms of peace depend on ignorance and are permanently lost once examination begins.
Religion, Utility, and Power
Analyzes how 'useful to whom?' reframes religious utility as a question of power, exposing both rhetorical strength and limits.
Civilizational Collapse and Knowledge Transfer
Civilizations matter less for surviving than for what knowledge they transmit across their collapse.
Lessing's Sufi Science Fiction
How Doris Lessing used the Canopus in Argos series to embed Idries Shah's Sufi cosmology in science fiction.
Cost of Perpetual Motion
Perpetual movement as evasion of self-knowledge, eroding patience, depth, and the capacity for commitment.
April 2026
Montaigne's Essay Method
How Montaigne's essayistic method uses self as instrument, associative structure, and inquiry as destination.
LLMs and Virtuous Laziness
LLMs lack virtuous laziness because effortless generation removes the scarcity that teaches humans to conserve judgment.
Spotify Engineering Culture Model
Explains Spotify's 2014 squad/tribe/chapter/guild model, its core principles, and the gap between aspiration and reality.
Structural Insincerity in Modern Life
Examines how insincerity became structural in modern life, eroding the shared grammar needed to distinguish genuine expression from performance.
Life Progress Calendar
Color-coded emoji grid tracking life progress by decades, years, and months from birth to expected death.
Adulthood as Latent Capacity
Maturity is latent capacity triggered by necessity, not a gradual developmental process—with implications for identity and growth.
Solutions Move Problems
Every solution displaces rather than eliminates problems; progress is measured by the quality of problems we trade into.
Self-Erasing Catastrophe and Civilizational Amnesia
Analysis of a parable where catastrophe erases its own evidence, trapping civilizations in recursive cycles of forgetting and repetition.
Conditions for Elite Engineering
Specific conditions—depth, failure, mentorship, and compounding learning—that enable engineers to reach and maintain elite status.
Identity as Self-Narrative
Personal identity is a self-edited story linking past to future, and recognizing your authorship can liberate or constrain you.
Three Positions on Existence
Three fundamental stances toward existence—affirmation, negation, and suspension—and what each position costs.
Two Epistemic Cycles
Two Latin mottos map epistemic life as inner formation (think, learn, connect, declare) and outer execution (perceive, connect, effect).
Media Manufactures Culture
Argues that television and social media manufacture culture rather than reflect it, and that local experience is more meaningful.
Books I may read
Curated reading list spanning fiction, nonfiction, and series with themed paths for focused exploration.
On The Real Terrain
A poem about navigating reality and imagination while flying above clouds at 35,000 feet.
March 2026
Bare Feet on Snow
A contemplative poem by Mark Ayers tracing four seasons of wordless communion between body and earth.
Mumpsimus Stubborn Adherence to Error
Defines 'mumpsimus' as stubborn adherence to known error, traced to a 16th-century priest's refusal to correct a Latin mispronunciation.
Poetry's Compulsion to Create
A 1984 poem by Mark Ayers on the compulsion to write despite poetry's vast surplus over readership.
Poetry's Compulsion to Create
A 1984 poem by Mark Ayers on the compulsion to write despite poetry's vast surplus over readership.
Tree of Knowing and Free Will
A philosophical retelling of Eden explores why human freedom matters and how the forbidden tree awakened insatiable restlessness.
Creativity as a Function of Library
Examines the claim that creative output is bounded by accumulated knowledge, weighing its practical truth against embodied experience and accident.
Cassandra Inversion
Saturation of urgent voices inverts the Cassandra myth, making genuine warnings indistinguishable from manufactured outrage.
Intent-First Development
AI coding agents are shifting the primary software artifact from code to intent documents, making PRDs the durable source of truth.
Urgency of Beginning
A short meditation on the urgency of starting before you're ready, driven by fear of losing stories to time.
Copyright as Historical Exception
Argues copyright is a 315-year anomaly born from printing press economics, not human default knowledge-sharing norms.
There Are Only Stories
Explores why all human knowledge is narrative, shifting the question from 'what is real?' to 'does this story serve life well?'
Leaning Against Your Nature
Self-knowledge matters most as a prerequisite for applying deliberate counterpressure against your predictable failures, not for aligning with your nature.
Knowing One Place Deeply
Personal essay on how seven years of sustained attention to one place becomes embodied knowledge, and the grief of losing it.
Complexity Generated by Discovery
Proposes that a creator actively generates new complexity in response to each human discovery, so mystery expands alongside understanding.
Dating Age Range Formula
Mathematical formula defining acceptable dating age ranges using the half-your-age-plus-seven rule.
Aging Past the Crowd
A personal reflection on the pandemic as the moment the author noticed the world had become younger than them.
Reflecting on a Resting Mind
A short contemplative poem bidding farewell to conscious thought at night, anticipating renewal at dawn.
Poetry for Oneself
A 1986 humorous poem by Mark Ayers on writing poetry purely for personal enjoyment.
Labels and Self-Definition
A prose poem on how self-chosen labels fail to capture authentic identity.
Fingerprints of Our Fellow Man
A 2019 poem by Mark Ayers on humanity's indelible mark across even the most remote natural landscapes.
Non-Rivalrous Asset Leverage
Explores how non-rivalrous assets like knowledge and trust invert scarcity logic, enabling accumulation through giving.
Selling Without Surrendering Control
How founders can monetize equity multiple times through partial sales while retaining voting control and decision-making authority.
Owning What You Never Had
How Bernie Ecclestone monetized Formula 1 four times by controlling value flow without ever formally owning the sport.
Consciousness as Activity
Examines whether consciousness is an activity always directed at objects or a capacity that exceeds its contents.
February 2026
Normalization of Public Indecency
Argues that normalized indecency in public life uses deliberate exhaustion to suppress resistance, demanding documentation and local action.
Automation Paradox
Mastery of frequent behaviors creates unconscious blind spots; the fix is deliberately examining automatic actions with fresh eyes.
Poetic Voice as Cultural Location
Larkin and Frost illustrate how poetic authority stems from cultural location and lived experience, not typographic style.
Elite Normalization of Democratic Collapse
How elite casual acceptance of democratic collapse normalizes authoritarianism and creates self-fulfilling institutional failure.
Kalbeth of the Orbital Authority
A sci-fi retelling of Macbeth in a future interplanetary empire where predictive AIs replace the three witches.
Cost of Honor in Corrupt Systems
Maintaining honor in corrupt systems extracts real costs but builds moral character through friction and resistance.
Tolerating Irresolvable Tension
Conflict and tension are permanent ground conditions of existence; health lies in tolerating ambiguity, not eliminating it.
Case for Radical Knowledge Sharing
Argues that sharing expertise freely builds more value than hoarding it, since real worth comes from continuous creation.
Uncompressed Public Thinking
Argues that mid-century thinkers like Feynman and Watts spoke before optimization, reputational risk, and compression eroded public thought.
Wisdom as Recovered Perception
Wisdom is recovered direct perception after experience—seeing freshly while retaining discriminative knowledge, across traditions and expertise.
Bowie, Metheny, Mays Collaboration
How Bowie, Metheny, and Mays created a hybrid jazz-rock crossover hit for the 1985 Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack.
New Metaphors for AI and Cognition
Argues AI shifts cognition from amplification to co-regulation, requiring new metaphors like exoskeletons and cognitive compilers.
Forced Ranking as Control
A Ranger School peer-ranking rebellion reveals how forced ranking systems enforce compliance and authority rather than measure merit.
Decline Narrative Bias
Explores why humans instinctively believe things were better in the past and how to counter this measurable distortion.
Birth, Death, and Purpose
How birth and death frame the search for meaning, and how willingness to die reveals authentic values.
Dunning-Kruger and AI Displacement
Mediocre thinkers predicting AI obsolescence may be most vulnerable to it, blinded by the same bias distorting their forecast.
Montaigne on Conversation
Modernized paraphrase of Montaigne's essay arguing that productive disagreement and intellectual humility refine judgment better than winning debates.
Masterless Warriors Across Cultures
Compares rōnin, hedge knights, and landless knights to reveal how Japan, Europe, and Westeros defined legitimacy for masterless warriors.
Sanity as Moral Culpability
Sanity paired with devious intent carries greater moral culpability than madness, as rational cognition enables calculated harm.
Semantic Diffusion in Software Terms
How precise technical terms like vibecoding and DevOps lose their original definitions through loose usage in developer communities.
Thought, Language, and Reality
Examines whether thought only becomes real when expressed in shareable language, weighing pragmatist arguments against tacit knowledge.
Retrospective Meaning-Making
Life-changing moments lack fanfare; their significance is constructed retrospectively through hindsight, not real-time recognition.
Elasticity of Moral Circles
Human moral circles expand during abundance and security, then contract to immediate community under scarcity and disruption.
January 2026
AI vs Human Collaboration
Argues the key AI-vs-human difference is that humans protect ego and status while AI works within constraints without negotiation.
Aqualung's Projected Menace
How 'Aqualung' exposes society's projection of menace onto homeless people rather than depicting actual threat.
2026 Astronomical Calendar
Moon phases, solstices, equinoxes, and Earth perihelion/aphelion dates with times for 2026.
Three Questions Before Speaking
Three filtering questions—true, kind, necessary—to guide mindful speech and ethical communication.
Roman Republic's Institutional Collapse
Argues the Roman Republic fell from institutional mismatch with its scale, not age—with implications for modern constitutional systems.
Commands as Intent in Claude Code
How Claude Code commands declare intent and delegate execution to skills or agents rather than containing logic themselves.
Origins and Future of Rat Race
Traces how industrialization created wage dependency and the rat race, and how AI and automation may dissolve it.
December 2025
Hell Yes or No Heuristic
Derek Sivers' heuristic for eliminating lukewarm commitments by only accepting opportunities that generate immediate enthusiasm.
AI Agents and Opportunity Cost
How AI agents transform opportunity cost from linear to multiplicative, creating new paradoxes around rest, quality, and meaning.
Context Length vs. Training Bias
Claude reflects on how training biases dominate early responses until accumulated context finally allows user intent to override presumptions.
Goal Persistence Model
A mathematical model shows how value, skill growth, depletion, and interference determine whether goals survive the vulnerable middle phase.
November 2025
Visibility, Inconsequence, Danger Trilemma
Claude models analyze a trilemma—invisibility, inconsequence, or danger—as competing strategies for navigating power and agency.
October 2025
Nordstrom Innovation Lab Toolkit
Comprehensive reference of Nordstrom Innovation Lab's frameworks, methodologies, and practices for product teams.
August 2025
Hunger That Knowledge Refines
Reflects on how every discovery expands ignorance rather than reducing it, making the hunger for knowledge self-perpetuating.
July 2025
Modernism vs. Nihilism on Institutions
Chesterton's fence distinguishes reformers who destroy from ignorance versus nihilists who destroy because they reject meaning itself.
May 2025
May Day Cross-Quarter
Reflections on May Day and Beltane as the cross-quarter midpoint between spring equinox and summer solstice.
April 2025
Chemex Brewing Guide
Step-by-step Chemex brewing guide with measurements, pour timing, and roast-specific adjustments for a balanced cup.
Baseless Misery and World Out of Phase
Examines baseless existential misery—suffering without cause—and the dissonance of inner emptiness amid a world bursting with life.
March 2025
Soft-Scrambled Egg Variations
Techniques and ingredients to vary soft-scrambled eggs: herbs, cheese, crispy toppings, and cream substitutes.
June 2024
Cocktail Ingredient Dilution Tasting
Technique for understanding cocktail ingredients by diluting 14ml into 1L of water and tasting.
April 2024
Async Email Boundary Setting
A standing out-of-office reply that sets honest expectations about infrequent email checks and offers alternatives for urgent contact.
February 2023
Galpin's 3-5 Training Rule
Andy Galpin's 3-5 Rule structures strength workouts around sets, reps, days, and rest all within the 3-5 range.