Sahil Bloom

Leonardo's life read through his notebooks, where art and science were one pursuit.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 asks what makes life worth living.

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

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.

How to separate skill from luck in business, sport and investing.

A novel in which a scientist answers an alien warning and invites first contact.

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair: its architect, and a serial killer working beside it.

The amateur's edge argument from the Magellan record.

Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.

Churchill's first year as prime minister, from Dunkirk through the Blitz.

Build habits by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.