1 The Strength of Weak Ties (Granovetter) | Sociology / networks | 1973 | Your loose social connections do more work in spreading information and opportunity than your close friends. | Explains why chatting with that former coworker you barely know can change your life more than your group chat ever does. | Half on the F train, half at a too-bright Midtown Pret between meetings. |
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2 Seeing Like a State (Scott) | Political science / urban studies | 1998 | Large institutions simplify messy reality into neat schemes, and those schemes often backfire on actual humans. | Now every time I see a new city "master plan" slide deck, I picture a forester quietly screaming in the background. | Slowly, over a winter, on the Q train and in the back corner of the Brooklyn Public Library. |
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3 A Theory of Justice (Rawls) | Moral philosophy | 1971 | If we chose the rules of society from behind a veil of ignorance, we’d design institutions that are fairer to the least advantaged. | Turned abstract fairness into a mental game I now play whenever I’m glaring at uneven turnstile lines. | Printed excerpts, dog-eared and coffee-stained, in a cramped East Village studio and on late-night D trains. |
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4 The Pareto Principle and Income Distribution (Clementi & Gallegati, etc.) | Economics / statistics | 2005-ish cluster of papers | Income and wealth often follow power-law distributions, where a small fraction holds a huge share of the total. | Once you see a power law, you start seeing it in everything from city rents to which bodega snacks actually sell. | At my desk in a Financial District office that unintentionally illustrated the inequality charts. |
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5 The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy (Dwork et al.) | Computer science / privacy | 2006–2014 line of work | You can share useful stats about individuals while mathematically bounding how much any one person’s data is exposed. | Made me less cynical about privacy—like there’s actually math between "track everything" and "know nothing." | Weekend deep dive at a Lower East Side coffee shop, laptop dying, outlets all taken. |
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6 Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al.) | Machine learning | 2017 | Proposes the Transformer architecture, ditching recurrence and using attention mechanisms to handle sequences efficiently. | The title sounds like a self-help book, but it quietly rewired half the tools I use at work and for side projects. | On a glowing phone screen, standing on a crowded 6 train, with bad service and too many acronyms. |
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7 Tidy Data (Hadley Wickham) | Data science | 2014 | If each variable is a column, each observation a row, and each table a type of observational unit, everything downstream gets easier. | Turned my chaotic CSVs into something almost Zen; also justified my obsession with renaming columns until they feel right. | On a work-issued laptop at a Brooklyn kitchen table, then immediately applied to a very messy Excel export. |
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8 Designing Calm Technology (Weiser & Brown) | Human-computer interaction | Late 1990s essays | Technology should move between the center and periphery of our attention, supporting life without screaming for it. | Made me hate notification badges more than usual and appreciate the quiet competence of a well-timed MetroCard beep. | Printed PDF folded into a notebook, skimmed on a bench in Bryant Park between museum wandering sessions. |
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9 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs) | Urban studies / planning | 1961 | Argues for dense, mixed-use, sidewalk-rich neighborhoods over utopian top-down planning and empty plazas. | Once you read it, a random Brooklyn corner with a deli, a playground, and people at all hours looks like a very coherent argument. | Used paperback from a West Village shop, read on the A train and on park benches all over the city. |
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TheLysts
