This book entertained me greatly:
- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It - Chris Voss & Tahl Raz
- I initially picked it up because of its good ratings, expecting to learn a few things about sales techniques. It is far more than that however; it talks about all the ways we can set up partnerships with others and build win-win situations. It also covers building and maintaining trust, the fundamentals of good communication, and what it really means to properly listen to someone. I started the first chapter expecting to skim every few pages, and found myself instead reading deeply and coming back to earlier pages a few times to ensure I fully understood each point. This book is a gold mine.
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On the topic of organizational science, the following article resonates with my own experience: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter by Andi Roberts. This analyzes the criteria that make overly structured communication inside corporations less effective, and discusses several strategies to work against that. In a nutshell, less structure and more communication outside of management-monitored channels leads to better collaboration and more productivity. Who would have known?
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My vacation time also included stepping further away from technical topics, so I purposefully avoided LLM-related content. Two good things caught my eye however.
In What will be left for us to work on?, Arvind Narayanan collates numerous small gold nuggets of wisdom from the past two years, and depicts a practical roadmap to a better integration of LLMs in our work and social life. I liked the combination of pragmatism, realism and optimism. (Related: this Stanford article by Neale Mahoney et al. contains some supporting numbers.)
Complementarily, in The Private Capture of Public Genius Cameron Armstrong recaps the various ways in which LLM creators (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) are exploiting public goods and develops a carefully constructed argument in favor of a “Corpus Royalty”: a public tax on LLM-related revenue to compensate the authors and creators whose work was used to train the models. While his proposal is specific to the US, the overall structure of the argument applies globally. The author may believe he's merely making a proposal; I personally believe this is a prediction. We will get there before long.
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Meanwhile, multiple times this year, I have been reporting on the steady drip of news and scientific results about how social media and digital devices are making young people dumber and generally hurting their generation. This month, I was happy to read Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies (reporting by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez), which quietly and clearly explains how and why the schools are doing what the title says.
Another side that is less reported on, but equally important, is the negative impact of the parents' device use on the well-being of their children. I read “Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?”: Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond by Don Grant et al., and it gave me a cold sweat when I realized most of the people I know with children are very close to the situations depicted here.
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The last bit of news I'd like to share is probably the biggest & most unreported macro-economic news of this year, and perhaps this decade: how China quietly saved the world last month, explained by Max Fisher.
In a nutshell, while the supply of oil was choked in Hormuz the Chinese government quietly released some of its unbelievably large strategic reserves on the market to avert the likely economic shock of the US-Iran war. The action was likely self-serving (their economy is export-driven, and they need their customers—us—to continue buying) but it likely helped us avoid a gigantic crisis.
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To wrap, this very short manifesto by Ben Landau-Taylor: If You Build It, They Will Come. Salient bit:
Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries. [...] Surprisingly, it turns out things don’t actually work that way. In fact, events happen when someone puts in the legwork to organize them. And one of the most reliable laws of the universe is that, if something takes a little bit of legwork, then most people just won’t do it. [...] I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders. [...] don’t know how to solve this undersupply at the scale of society. But you can solve it at the scale of your own community by just supplying it.
Let's do it!
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References:
- Chris Voss & Tahl Raz, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It.
- Andi Roberts, The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter.
- Arvind Narayanan, What will be left for us to work on?.
- Neale Mahoney, Erika McEntarfer & Karsen Wahal, What is really happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), July 2026.
- Cameron Armstrong, The Private Capture of Public Genius.
- Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies, Fortune.
- Don Grant et al., “Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?”: Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond, Frontiers in Psychology, 2026.
- Max Fisher, China quietly saved the world last month, YouTube.
- Ben Landau-Taylor, If You Build It, They Will Come.