Reading List
Books I've read and kept thinking about. I'll add to this as I go.
Brick's argument is that elite athletic performance is more about mental strategy than physical capacity — pacing, self-talk, where you direct your attention. Good for thinking about how to handle pressure in general, not just in sport.
Rivera spent years inside hiring processes at top consulting, banking, and law firms and found that what passes for "merit" is often just cultural familiarity — interviewers selecting people who remind them of themselves. Grades matter less than how you present yourself, especially once you already have the baseline competence to be in the room.
A pushback against the college admissions obsession. Bruni's argument is that the name on your diploma matters far less than what you do with your time — reassuring and a little demanding depending on how you read it. I think location matters more than rankings when picking a school, and people tend to self-select anyway.
A former Facebook policy director's account of what it actually looked like inside. Lots of out-of-pocket moments. The author describing a 26-year-old Dartmouth grad as a "baby" is a good preview of the tone.
Profiles of the women lawyers who showed up at pivotal legal moments during a particularly chaotic stretch of American politics. Less about legal theory, more about what it looks like to act on principle when it costs something. The emotional labor that goes into civil rights law is not something I'd thought much about before.
Merkel's PhD in quantum chemistry was genuinely surprising to me — she came up as a scientist, not a politician, which makes her career trajectory even more interesting. More people with technical backgrounds should be in government. There are too many lawyers!