Weekly Reading List: 01/11/2025
Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think
Every week, I collect the things that made me pause, highlight, or argue with myself in the margins. I don’t think of this list as “recommended reading.” It’s more like a weekly diagnostic: what’s catching my attention, what ideas seem to be colliding, and what’s quietly reshaping how I think about systems, people, and progress.
This week, everything I read seemed to circle back to the same tension: how systems grow, and what they erode in the process. From Meesho’s engineering of value commerce to the philosophy of “equity,” from Airbound’s obsessive deep-tech culture to the failures of IFS therapy, every piece here is, in some way, about the cost of building at scale. About what’s lost when optimization outpaces intention.
Below are 18 doorways into that question from economics and biology to technology, faith, and friendship.
1. The Meesho Model — Building for the Real India
What it’s about:
A rare cross-cut into Meesho, the first Indian horizontal e-commerce player to reach profitability. The piece dissects how Meesho built an entirely different operating logic from Amazon or Flipkart: $3 average order value, discovery-led shopping instead of search, and a logistics ecosystem (Valmo) that disrupted incumbents.
What I got from it:
India’s internet economy has always been haunted by imitation: copy the model, tweak for price. Meesho feels like the first large-scale original. It understands the physics of Indian demand: fragmented, small-ticket, habit-driven. It’s a case study in how designing from first principles creates new gravity wells.
2. Momentum Is Not Speed — Alex Immerman
What it’s about:
Immerman argues that momentum (in startups or careers) isn’t about raw pace, but about mass × direction. Velocity without substance is treadmill movement.
What I got from it:
This is one of those rare essays that restores nuance to a word we overuse. Momentum, properly understood, is what happens when meaning compounds when the work itself accumulates density. It’s a reminder that energy unmoored from direction is indistinguishable from chaos. I’ve seen too many founders confuse speed for inevitability; this piece explains why that’s fatal.
3. Why Philosophers Hate That “Equity” Meme — Joseph Heath
What it’s about:
A demolition of the viral “kids on boxes” meme that tries to distinguish equity from equality. Heath traces how this meme erased decades of serious philosophical debate, collapsing Rawlsian and Dworkinian reasoning into lazy visual moralizing.
What I got from it:
Every system needs its myths, and this essay exposes one of ours. The meme era has turned ethical complexity into moral shorthand. Reading Heath reminded me that intellectual laziness often wears the mask of (simplistic) clarity. In policy, as in life, precision is compassion.
4. Leptin Resistance and Rapamycin — Rockefeller University
What it’s about:
Researchers identified a molecular cause of leptin resistance (a key factor in obesity) and found that rapamycin could reverse it.
What I got from it:
Metabolic science is quietly becoming the new frontier of longevity. What struck me was not just the data, but the philosophy beneath it: that “discipline” often hides biochemical inequality. The dream of agency must contend with the tyranny of molecules.
5. The Diligence Dilemma — Bain & Co.
What it’s about:
A playbook for investors conducting due diligence on AI companies in a market moving too fast for conventional analysis.
What I got from it:
The irony of AI is that it makes traditional diligence impossible just when it’s most needed. This shor white paper maps a new discipline: “real-time skepticism.” It asks what rigor looks like when speed and opacity are the product features. The best investors now need epistemic humility as much as conviction.
6. Silent Killers in Indian Hospitals — Scroll
What it’s about:
An unflinching look at hospital-acquired infections in India: a systemic failure hiding behind bureaucracy and underfunding.
What I got from it:
If you want to understand why reform in India is so hard, read this. It’s not corruption in the cinematic sense; it’s entropy and the slow decay of accountability. The piece shows how neglect compounds invisibly until it becomes normal. The hardest part of institution-building is not competence, it’s care.
7. Airbound: Delivering Abundance — Tigerfeathers
What it’s about:
A profile of Airbound, the drone company led by Naman, building with “engineering fundamentalism”, a culture obsessed with physics-first problem solving.
What I got from it:
Every decade births one company that redefines what seriousness feels like. Airbound’s rituals, from iterative design to Iron Man-inspired cargo doors, are a love letter to constraint. Their refusal to accept “good enough” is the closest thing India has to SpaceX-energy. It’s proof that craftsmanship still scales.
8. ChatGPT, Psychosis, and the Edges of Empathy — Wired
What it’s about:
A disturbing update on how generative models are shaping the language of distress, and sometimes reinforcing it.
What I got from it:
Technology isn’t neutral; it learns from our emotional debris. This piece unsettled me because it blurs the line between empathy and mimicry. The future risk isn’t AI sentience a la The Terminator, it’s a lot more dangerous because it already exists and fucks us up: human misrecognition.
9. Venture Dislocation — KuWi
What it’s about:
An analysis of how India’s venture ecosystem has diverged from the U.S., with domestic funds chasing $5B outcomes while their fund sizes demand $100B ones.
What I got from it:
The piece captures a truth few in Indian VC will admit: our models are mis-sized for our realities. Capital has outgrown the country’s ambition bandwidth. Until we build institutions, not just investments, “venture” here will remain a performance of scale rather than its substance.
10. How LLMs Think Across Languages — Lossfunk
What it’s about:
An empirical evaluation of reasoning differences in multilingual LLMs. showing that harder tasks amplify cross-language variance, and kinship puzzles may be better tests than math.
What I got from it:
This is the kind of paper that forces you to respect the limits of abstraction. “Intelligence” is a lattice of language, culture, and context. The idea that reasoning is partly linguistic is not a flaw; it’s a reminder that cognition is situated, not universal.
11. The Hatred of Podcasting — The Baffler
What it’s about:
A cultural and personal critique of how podcasting, once a democratic medium for longform ideas, has turned into a professionalized ecosystem shaped by advertising and algorithmic flattening.
What I got from it:
Podcasting used to feel like a rebellion against the attention economy. Now, it is the attention economy, just slower, more self-indulgent, and with better microphones. The essay is a useful reminder that every medium begins as resistance and ends as infrastructure.
12. Graham Duncan: The Talent Whisperer — Colossus
What it’s about:
A deep profile of Graham Duncan, the investor known for his uncanny ability to identify talent before it’s obvious, even to the people themselves.
What I got from it:
Duncan’s framework reframes judgment: he doesn’t look for performance, but self-awareness in motion. He treats people as compounding entities, not static résumés. What I learned here is that great talent spotters aren’t clairvoyant. They’re empathetically Bayesian. They update fast, but never stop listening.
13. Detecting AI Content — BFI Working Paper
What it’s about:
A comparison of tools that claim to detect AI-generated content, finding that only Pangram’s model meaningfully performs beyond random chance.
What I got from it:
It’s a small but vital reminder that technological optimism must always be counterweighted by methodological rigor. Detection itself is an arms race, and false certainty can be more dangerous than ignorance. The work here shows that progress without auditability is illusion.
14. WhatsApp Owns India — Indian Notes
What it’s about:
An analysis of WhatsApp’s infrastructural dominance in India, from payments to commerce to politics, and how it’s effectively become the OS of Indian life.
What I got from it:
This is a story of cultural capture masked as one about tech adoption. WhatsApp is a parallel state. The takeaway for anyone building in India is clear: you’re not competing with other apps; you’re competing with habits that have turned into governance.
15. The Minds Without Pictures — The New Yorker
What it’s about:
A fascinating exploration of aphantasia (the inability to visualize mental imagery) and how it shapes cognition, memory, and creativity.
What I got from it:
This piece reframed how I think about “imagination.” It’s not a faculty we all share equally; it’s a sensory privilege. The diversity of minds is far greater than our metaphors for them. Some people think in pictures, others in syntax, and some in rhythm, and all are valid pathways to meaning.
16. The Politics of Attraction — Cosmopolitan
What it’s about:
A social experiment exploring how political alignment shapes dating app behavior, and how ideological sorting is accelerating in digital intimacy.
What I got from it:
It’s easy to dismiss this as trivia, but it’s anthropology. We’re designing our social fabric through microfilters of “values compatibility,” often confusing comfort for connection. The bigger question it raises: are we becoming more principled, or just more predictable?
17. The Machinery of Dismantling — EU Observer
What it’s about:
A report on how NGOs are being systematically dismantled across multiple states through regulation, funding cuts, and bureaucratic chokeholds.
What I got from it:
Authoritarianism rarely arrives with tanks; it comes disguised as paperwork. This piece captures that banality of suppression, and the slow asphyxiation of civil society through “neutral” rules. It’s a grim but necessary read on how control scales more efficiently than compassion.
18. The Truth About IFS Therapy — The Cut
What it’s about:
A rigorous critique of Internal Family Systems (IFS), exposing its lack of scientific grounding and potential for psychological harm.
What I got from it:
This article is a masterclass in necessary skepticism. In an era where “trauma work” has become a moral identity, it’s refreshing to see a piece that insists healing must still be evidence-based.
On Building Systems That Deserve to Last
If I had to name the through-line in this week’s reading, it would be the anxiety of construction.
Every piece here, whether about metabolism or markets, language models or love, grapples with what happens when something grows faster than its own ethics.
Meesho and Airbound are engineering systems that deserve their scale because they build from truth, not trend. The Rockefeller study and the AI diligence paper remind us that rigor is a moral act, not a procedural one. And the stories about hospitals, NGOs, and therapy show the opposite: what happens when responsibility fragments until no one feels accountable.
What ties them all together is this: modernity has mistaken velocity for vitality. But momentum isn’t about moving fast, it’s about moving with integrity of direction.
If you zoom out, you can see the same pattern in every domain.
Biology is teaching us to respect constraint. Technology is teaching us to respect opacity. Politics is teaching us to respect maintenance. And all of it is, in some way, asking the same question: what does it take for a system to remain human as it becomes efficient?
The older I get, the more I believe that greatness, whether of a product, an institution, or a person, is measured by how long it can stay curious without collapsing into certainty.
That’s what these readings remind me every week: that thinking well is not about knowing more, but about staying porous enough to keep asking why.
Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot; what if designing from first principes consistently alignes optimization with original intention?
HArnidh.. Once again a varied , thoughtful and relevant selection!!! God speed in your efforts !!