Weekly Reading List: 14/09/2025

Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think

Every week I pull together the things that snagged my attention. The essays I couldn’t skim, the studies that made me scribble margin notes, the articles that left me more unsettled than satisfied. I don’t do this to be comprehensive. I do it to keep a record of what shifted me.

Sometimes these pieces sharpen what I already think. More often, they disrupt it. They’re reminders that the world is stranger, messier, and more interconnected than any one perspective can hold. I’ve come to think of this list less as “recommended reading” and more as a set of doorways: some open into clarity, others into discomfort, a few into outright absurdity. Step through enough of them, and your mental map of the week looks different on the other side.

This week, we move between therapists quietly outsourcing to AI, Diet Coke as identity, Tolkien as post-9/11 therapy, the mechanics of dating scams, and the way negative thought loops corrode cognition. Bubbles, doodles, acquisitions, and fears, it’s all here, stitched by the strange fact that each piece, in its own way, is about trust. Who earns it, who abuses it, and how fragile it always is.

The Reads

1. Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT
MIT Tech Review uncovers an unsettling trend: therapists leaning on ChatGPT without telling patients. Sometimes it’s for clinical notes, sometimes for suggested interventions, sometimes even in mediated conversations. The piece lands harder because therapy is one of those professions built entirely on trust. If your therapist uses AI without disclosure, does it cheapen the care? Or is it just another tool, like a notebook or diagnostic manual? My read: it’s not the tech that’s the problem, but the secrecy. Once disclosure disappears, the foundation of the relationship crumbles.

2. The Diet Coke Essay
Final Girl Digital turns what could be a throwaway ode into a miniature cultural history. Diet Coke becomes more than caffeine and carbonation: it’s a symbol of femininity, control, rebellion, even identity. What I love about essays like this is how they elevate the banal. The can in your hand is no longer just a drink; it’s shorthand for taste, aspiration, even class. It makes me wonder: what’s my “Diet Coke”? The ordinary object I imbue with disproportionate meaning?

3. How to Become an Academic Weapon
This piece skewers and celebrates the “academic weapon” archetype that’s gone viral on TikTok. On the surface, it’s about study hacks. Underneath, it’s about the performance of productivity; How we’ve aestheticized ambition into something you can post about. There’s both satire and truth here. It left me thinking about the line between discipline and spectacle: are you studying for yourself, or for the idea of yourself that others see?

4. A Practical Guide to Using AI in…
Most AI content lives in abstraction. This guide refuses that temptation and focuses instead on implementation. It asks: where does AI actually slot into work? Not as a silver bullet, but as another piece of the workflow puzzle. What’s useful here isn’t the tools themselves, but the framing: novelty wears off quickly, but integration is where value sticks.

5. Vimeo acquired by Bending Spoons
Vimeo, once YouTube’s stylish cousin, is now just another acquisition target. Variety’s coverage makes clear how inevitable this felt. Independent platforms rarely survive once user habits shift and scale becomes the only game. The nostalgia here is real: Vimeo stood for indie film, for higher production values, for an alternative culture online. Its sale is another reminder that digital countercultures rarely stay counter for long.

6. Kevin Rose on why VCs are scared of AI
Kevin Rose says the quiet part out loud: VCs aren’t just excited about AI, they’re terrified of it. The fear is that AI won’t just disrupt markets, it will obliterate moats. If every startup has access to the same base models, what differentiates one investment from another? For an industry built on scarcity and edge, abundance is an existential threat. Listening to this, I realized how often “disruption” sounds glamorous until you’re the one whose business model is on the chopping block.

7. The Doodle Report, Vol. 1
Zaria Parvez’s newsletter is delightfully unpolished: doodles, scraps, fragments. It feels like being let into someone’s creative process midstream, not after the fact. In a world where every piece of content chases virality, this kind of small-scale intimacy feels radical.

8. The Epstein Emails
Bloomberg surfaces new Epstein emails, implicating powerful figures like Peter Mandelson. What’s chilling isn’t just the content but the inevitability: power, money, politics, exploitation, we know these systems intertwine, but seeing them in black-and-white is still nauseating.

9. Fellowship of the Ring and Post-9/11 America
Vox argues that The Lord of the Rings films became unexpected therapy for a grieving America. Released just months after 9/11, Tolkien’s stories of resilience and fellowship resonated in ways neither filmmakers nor audiences anticipated. The essay captures how art becomes ballast in moments of collective trauma. It reminded me of how often cultural meaning gets retrofitted in hindsight. art meets us where we are, not where it was intended to.

10. Introductions and the Forward Intro Email
Roy Bahat digs into something deceptively small: how we introduce people to each other. His argument: a thoughtful forward is a professional kindness that compounds into trust and networks. It’s the opposite of the lazy “connecting you two, take it from here.” I’ve seen this in my own inbox. Introductions set the tone for entire relationships. Get them right, and you’ve smoothed the runway. Get them wrong, and you’ve planted skepticism before the first call.

11. Oracle’s stock spike and the AI bubble
Oracle’s soaring valuation, fueled more by AI hype than fundamentals, is a case study in bubble logic. Investors aren’t asking “what is Oracle building?” but “how can I not miss out?” The piece frames this as déjà vu; dot-com all over again. My takeaway: bubbles aren’t just irrationality. They’re collective storytelling. We want to believe in something, even if we know it’s shaky.

12. Ross Gerber on AI, Buffett, and bubbles
Ross Gerber positions himself as a Buffett disciple in an AI moment that feels anything but disciplined. His tension is relatable: how do you take advantage of a bubble without becoming its victim?

13. Swipe Right, Pay the Price
Outlook India documents a scam where women partner with cafés, swipe on men below their league, insist on going there, run up inflated bills on cocktails and hookah, and then demand the men pay. Once the man leaves, the woman and the establishment split the bounty. What fascinated me wasn’t the grift itself but the reaction: men report being more angry about the lack of sexual payoff than the money lost. It’s a brutal little mirror of gendered entitlement in dating, where the outrage reveals as much as the scam itself.

14. Repetitive negative thinking and cognitive decline in older adults
This study finds that repetitive negative thinking (RNT) (rumination, worry, mental loops) is strongly linked with cognitive decline in older adults. The finding isn’t surprising, but it is profound: the way we think can literally erode our capacity to think. What struck me most was the idea of RNT as a modifiable risk factor. Unlike age or genetics, our mental habits can be shaped. It reframes “mindset” from pop-psych cliché into something closer to preventive medicine.What would mental hygiene look like if we treated it as seriously as brushing our teeth?

That’s the stack for this week. What connects them, at least for me, is the reminder that systems, whether they’re markets, relationships, platforms, or even thought patterns, are held together by stories. We trust therapists until they break the frame. We trust Diet Coke to be just a drink until it becomes a symbol. We trust investments until the bubble pops. We trust our own minds until they betray us with loops we can’t escape.

And yet, here’s the hopeful part: stories can be rewritten. Therapists could disclose. Investors could recalibrate. Platforms could reinvent. We could learn to train our thinking patterns the way we train our muscles. Reading these pieces side by side makes me feel less like the world is falling apart and more like it’s constantly offering invitations to notice, to adjust, to do better.

If one of these pieces lingers with you, pass it on. And if you’ve read something this week that deserves to sit in next week’s stack, send it my way. This is as much about trading maps as it is about keeping one.