Library

What stayed with me from each. ● reading now.

Lisanne Bainbridge, Ironies of Automation (1983). Automate the routine and people are left with only the hard cases, with less practice than ever.
Eleanor Maguire et al., London taxi drivers' hippocampi (2000). Train a skill hard enough and the brain physically changes.
Andy Clark & David Chalmers, The Extended Mind (1998). If a notebook does your memory's job, is it part of your mind?
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966). "We know more than we can tell."
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential ●. How a kitchen turns standards nobody wrote down into instinct.

Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova & Van Reenen, Who Becomes an Inventor in America? (2019). Ability is everywhere; exposure isn't.
Alexandre Mas & Enrico Moretti, Peers at Work (2009). One fast cashier speeds up the whole shift.
Michael Muthukrishna & Joseph Henrich, Innovation in the Collective Brain (2016). Invention as a property of networks, not individuals.
László Polgár, Bring Up Genius! Three daughters, one hypothesis, three chess champions.

Aparna Chandra, William Hubbard & Sital Kalantry, Court on Trial (2023). The government is a party to most cases before the Supreme Court.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998). Why tidy schemes fail on messy ground.
Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945). The knowledge that matters is local, and mostly unwritten.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2009). Court scrutiny is a checklist. We made ours shorter.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene ●. Cooperation built out of competition. Also where the word "meme" comes from.

Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon. His intelligence rises and his friendships fall away. The cruelty is that understanding doesn't help.
Ted Chiang, Understand. The same premise, with no ceiling.
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). Two women, one marriage, thirty years of Afghanistan. What the law allows, and what it takes from you anyway.
Irving Stone, Lust for Life (1934). Van Gogh's life as a novel: about ten years of painting, almost nothing sold, and no sign of stopping.