Weekly Reading List: 24/8/2025
Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think
Every week I collect the pieces that made me pause, highlight, or argue with myself in the margins. Some weeks it’s all venture and startups, other weeks it’s politics, science, or a fragment of philosophy that lingers longer than it should. This list is not meant to be exhaustive or newsy, it’s a set of ideas worth slowing down for, across domains that don’t usually sit together in one tab bar.
This week’s mix stretches from the fragility of AI business models to the hidden career pipeline into impact investing, from Bollywood’s struggle with memory to the philosophical weight of how our identities unfold in relationships. Settle in.
The Reads
AI is a money trap: A scathing essay on the economics of today’s AI gold rush. Billions are flowing in, but most companies can’t explain how they’ll defend margins once compute costs and commoditization bite. A useful reminder that technological brilliance and sustainable business are not the same thing.
As China slows, India emerges as beauty’s next bet: Global beauty players, long reliant on China’s consumption machine, are turning toward India. This piece lays out not just the market math but the cultural dynamics shaping demand: youth-driven aspiration, regional diversity, and a willingness to experiment that might make India the next beauty laboratory.
Who finds jobs in impact investing?: A fascinating study of labor flows into and out of the impact investing sector, using a dataset of nearly 350,000 professional profiles. Only ~832 MBAs currently work in impact investing, mostly in VC/PE, and fewer than 7% of students with prior impact experience return after business school. A sharp look at how thin, and geographically concentrated, this pipeline really is.
Cursor’s conundrum: An in-depth look at Cursor, the AI-native IDE, and the bigger challenge of building for developers. Why tools that promise productivity boosts often struggle to dislodge entrenched workflows, and what it says about the future of coding environments.
Some parts of you only emerge for others: A lyrical meditation from Velvet Noise on how identity isn’t fixed but relational. Certain selves only appear in the presence of certain people, and perhaps that’s not fragmentation but expansion.
The illusion of thinking: Apple’s ML research team dissects why large language models look like they’re reasoning, when in reality they’re weaving patterns without comprehension. Raises big questions about safety, trust, and how much “intelligence” we’re projecting onto machines.
Nano Banana: the mysterious AI model: Is it Google? Is it Apple? Nobody really knows. A quirky but telling piece on “Nano Banana,” an enigmatic AI model surfacing in academic chatter. A symbol of how fast the field is outpacing transparency and oversight.
9 projects I’m working on that make me come alive: More than a project list, this is a philosophical meditation on why certain kinds of work feel enlivening. Some projects are tiny experiments, some ambitious, all reminders that tinkering is often the root of meaning, not a distraction from it.
A YouTube education: An essay on how YouTube has become one of the world’s most powerful informal universities. What started as tutorials and explainers has morphed into a massive parallel education system; sometimes rigorous, sometimes chaotic, but undeniably influential.
Can AI take over education?: The Atlantic weighs the promise and peril of AI tutors in classrooms. Hyper-personalized instruction is now possible, but so is homogenized thinking. The bigger question: do we want education optimized, or humanized?
Meet the Indian tradwives: Scroll profiles the rise of India’s “tradwife” influencers, women promoting traditional domestic roles while racking up millions of views. It’s part aspiration, part resistance, and part monetization, a cultural shift worth watching closely.
Why new Bollywood lacks iconic moments: Once upon a time, films gave us lines, songs, and scenes that became part of everyday speech. Today’s Bollywood, by contrast, feels transient. India Today unpacks why, and what it says about how cinema, streaming, and memory are colliding.
Notes on India’s online gaming bill: A smart breakdown of the Centre’s new gaming bill, analyzing both its necessity and its overreach. Regulation may protect users, but over-regulation risks stifling an industry that could be a major export.
Good ideas: Henrik Karlsson reflects on the texture of good ideas: why they often look obvious in hindsight, why they resist neat categorization, and why environments that generate them are rarer than we think.
How to stop feeling lost in tech: A thoughtful, in-depth reflection for anyone disoriented in a field that moves faster than they can. Less about productivity hacks and more about re-centering: carving out focus, building sustainable rhythms, and resisting the constant churn.
Trump just hired Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia as chief design officer: A curveball from the worlds of politics and design. Former Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is now CDO under Trump; a surprising collision of startup aesthetics and political power.
That’s this week’s list. If one of these sparked something, share it with a friend who’d enjoy the rabbit hole. If you’ve read something recently that belongs on the next list, hit reply and send it my way, I love trading recommendations.
And if you prefer the shorter, visual version, I post this list weekly on Instagram too: @harnidhk
See you next week with a fresh stack of ideas!