Ev Williams

A novel in which industrialists vanish from an economy run by government directives.

A novel of wartime codebreakers and their descendants building a data haven.

A novel of a feudal space empire fighting over a desert planet and its spice.

A novel of the young Einstein's dreams of different kinds of time, in 1905.

A novel of a gifted boy trained in an orbiting school for war against aliens.

A novel of an insomniac who starts a secret fighting club with a wild extremist.

A novel of schoolboys stranded on an island whose self-rule collapses into violence.

Young writer friends wander from coast to coast in search of whatever they find.

A novel of a hacker in a corporate-run America and its virtual world, the Metaverse.

Two Jewish cousins, a refugee from Nazi Prague and a Brooklyn writer, make comics.

A satire of ambition, race, class and greed around a 1980s New York bond trader.

A novel of a sixteen-year-old's days alone in New York after his school expels him.

A novel of a nanotech future and a stolen copy of an interactive teaching book.

A novel of an architect who will build only by his own judgment, whatever it costs.

A novel of a rich man of unknown origin on Long Island and the woman he wants back.

A novel of an astronaut left alone on Mars who must survive until rescue.

What eighteen long-lived companies did differently from close rivals in their fields.

What eleven companies did to turn fifteen ordinary years into fifteen great ones.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

Eight practices shared by well-run companies.

Disruption theory used to forecast how industries will change.

When to push through a hard stretch and when to quit a dead end.

Effectiveness is learned practice: manage time, pick priorities, decide well.

How judging firms by their results corrupts most business research and advice.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

Without shelf limits, sales of many niche products add up to rival the hits.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

How machines and economies grow so complex that they behave like living systems.

How snap judgments work, when to trust them and when they mislead.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

People who think ability grows with effort learn more than those who think it fixed.

Why people stick too long with failing projects and careers, and how to quit well.

Daniel Gilbert's accessible account of affective forecasting — our poor ability to predict what will make us happy. His research on immune neglect and focalism is less cited than Kahneman's work but equally well-evidenced.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Get commitments out of your head into a trusted system, and decide next actions.

The plateau and long practice; mastery as a delayed reward

52 principles for getting things done with less stress: mindset, priorities, action.

Tim Ferriss's book belongs on a personal-finance list not for its investment advice but for its income argument: the fastest way to reach financial independence may be redesigning how and where you work rather than cutting spending to the bone. The 'new rich' framework is deliberately provocative, and the specific tactics age poorly, but the income-side case remains underweighted in most FIRE writing.

Bill Gates from Harvard and Microsoft BASIC to the IBM deal that made Microsoft.

A life of Benjamin Franklin, the foremost American of his day.

Why tech products stall between early adopters and the mainstream, and how to cross.

Companies lose their position by broadening; narrowing the focus wins it back.

Rules for advertising that sells, drawn from direct-response testing.

Marketing happens in the buyer's mind: find an open position there and own it.

How ideas and behaviour spread like epidemics, and the three factors that tip them.

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

When groups judge better than experts, and the four conditions that make it work.

Judge decisions by their reasoning, not their outcomes, and think in odds.

Incentives and data applied to cheating teachers, sumo wrestlers and other puzzles.

Selection acts on genes; bodies are vehicles that genes build to copy themselves.

How the Oakland A's won on a small payroll by buying players the market undervalued.

A boy from a poor, broken home discovers football and rises to the NFL.

From LinkExchange to Zappos, and the case for building a company on its culture.

eBay: the cleanest early case of a pure marketplace take rate.

A venture adviser on startups and the trap of the deferred life plan.

Incerto volume 4

A father and son's motorcycle trip framing an inquiry into what Quality means.

History read as an expanding series of non-zero-sum games

Short reflections and practices for starting mindfulness, read at random or daily.