Crushing It in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate: How a Small Investor Can Make It Big

Learned a few new good things. I wish there were more numbers and analysis of markets rather than generic strategies on value add and making offers with financing.

2018.01.01 · 1 min · Brian Murray

Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

More informative than other books I’ve read on the subject, a solid grounding in the underlying philosophy and a dispassionate view of the competing viewpoints. While mainly written from a UK perspective, it includes a good overview of the American and European views. The author’s restraint from editorializing is laudable, and the book is wonderfully brief. Highly recommended.

2017.07.18 · 1 min · Nigel Warburton

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

Makes me want to start a startup.

2017.07.09 · 1 min · Randall E. Stross

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

I liked the overview of the subject, and the author does a good job of illustrating how malleable the concepts around the 1st amendment are, but the organization of the book was confusing, and the author was clearly unable to keep his own biases out of the narrative. Sadly it makes me distrust the rest of the content I read. Update After reading more books on the subject, this seems to be one of the more neutral takes.

2017.05.30 · 1 min · Anthony Lewis

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Didn’t have anything insightful or actionable. Something along the lines of ‘be careful with ML, it can do things you don’t expect’ followed by a lot of examples where ML matters in people’s lives (in a bad way).

2017.05.30 · 1 min · Cathy O'Neil

How to Make Big Money in Small Apartments

The concepts were good, but this would have been more useful as an article, not a book.

2017.01.31 · 1 min · Lance Edwards

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

I didn’t really enjoy this book. There’s so much going on, but nothing had depth, and even the plot didn’t make it far. The politics felt shallow, written mainly in the service of plot. The genderless bias was interesting, but half of the characters were breaking the rules, so maybe they weren’t really rules to begin with. The science fiction aspects felt tacked on and surface level. The narrator interjections started out interesting, but ended up tedious. The theological / existential questions may have been the most interesting parts of the book, but they never went anywhere.

2016.08.19 · 1 min · Ada Palmer

The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

tl;dr - Russian authorities were slower than their Chinese/American counterparts understanding the potential impact of the web, but now they get it, so now Putin is in charge. A great chapter on Snowden as well.

2016.06.05 · 1 min · Andrei Soldatov

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

A great compliment to porter erisman’s book, but lacks much inside perspective on the company. A decent primer on Chinese tech.

2016.05.18 · 1 min · Duncan Clark

Indonesia, Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation

More etc. than about Indonesia. I wish there were more history and macro level analysis, but the memoir format of the book was palatable.

2016.05.08 · 1 min · Elizabeth Pisani