Weekly Reading List: 25/10/2025

Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think

Every week, I try to read across disciplines that rarely speak to each other (economics, sociology, neuroscience, policy, and technology for this one) and notice where they overlap. The through-line, more often than not, is how systems shape human behavior faster than we can consciously respond.

This week’s readings are all about that acceleration: how our attention, our savings habits, our moral vocabularies, and even our bodies are being rewired by structures we once built for convenience. It’s not just that technology is changing what we do, it’s changing what we’re capable of noticing. The QJE paper on app addiction turns distraction into an economic externality; the SIP study treats investing as behavioral engineering; essays on Gen Z, autism, and honesty show how language and incentives now write the script for our emotional lives. Even the WHOOP whitepaper and E. coli thought experiment reveal how optimization logic is seeping into biology itself.

None of these readings are alarmist. But taken together, they show how much of modern life runs on feedback loops we didn’t design intentionally, and how reclaiming agency now means understanding the systems that train us as much as the ones we train.

1. Peer Effects of Mobile App Usage on College Students — Quarterly Journal of Economics
This study from a Chinese university offers some of the most concrete causal evidence yet on the social spread of phone addiction. Roommate pairings became a natural experiment: a one-standard-deviation increase in your roommate’s app use made you 5.8% more likely to do the same, and your GPA and later wages both dropped. The finding that your roommate’s scrolling can hurt your income years later reframes attention as a shared economic resource. The broader implication is that cognitive environments behave like ecosystems: a single distracted node weakens the whole network.

2. Are SIPs “Sahi”? — SSRN
A rigorous technical evaluation of India’s favorite retail-investment vehicle: the Systematic Investment Plan. The authors demonstrate that SIPs aren’t inherently superior to lump-sum investing; rather, they are contextually appropriate commitment devices for investors prone to timing errors or lacking liquidity discipline. The behavioral insight is that most people need better guardrails over better alpha. The paper punctures decades of marketing around “safety” and reframes SIPs as psychological infrastructure, not performance products.

3. Gen Z Is Worse Than You Think — The Republic of Letters
Clare Ashcraft’s argues that Gen Z’s paralysis isn’t about fragility but about oversupply: too many choices, too much comfort, too little necessity. When survival became optional, meaning eroded. What stands out is her framing of “disembodiment”- a generation living in its head because its body is no longer economically required. It’s a sharp way to describe how digital life divorces consequence from action. The essay’s closing plea, to rebuild small, inconvenient responsibilities, really spoke to me.

4. Autism as a Linguistically Created Condition — Isha Snow
Snow’s provocation is that diagnosis is partly a linguistic act: the words we use don’t just describe difference; they manufacture it. She shows how medical and cultural vocabularies turn variance into category, sometimes conferring support but also fixing identity. The piece makes you rethink every “label” movement (neurodiversity, gender, even productivity) through the lens of linguistic feedback. It’s a reminder that language evolves faster than empathy, and our definitions often outpace our capacity to hold nuance.

5. Your Heart Thinks, Feels, Remembers — Daniel Stickler
A synthesis of cardiology and cognition. Stickler explores the heart’s neural network and its role in emotion and memory. Beyond the biochemistry, the piece raises an epistemological point: Western medicine over-weights what can be measured, under-weights what can be felt. As neuroscience expands its scope, it’s forcing a rewrite of the hierarchy between body and mind, something that will redefine how we treat mental health over the next decade.

6. Seven-Minute Heist at the Louvre — Wall Street Journal
A straightforward crime story that reads like systems analysis. In seven minutes, precision planning exploited museum protocols that hadn’t updated in years. Every legacy system, from banks to governments, eventually becomes predictable enough to hack. Efficiency always drifts toward vulnerability.

7. A Mathematician’s Lament — Paul Lockhart (2002)
Lockhart’s argument, that math is an art form masquerading as a science, still holds up. He blames pedagogy for turning creative exploration into rule-following. In startup language: we’re teaching kids to optimize before they learn to invent. Reading it now, it doubles as a metaphor for adult life under algorithmic logic, where intuition is undervalued until it’s rediscovered as “innovation.”

8. Sanae Takaichi Becomes Japan’s Prime Minister — The New York Times
Takaichi’s rise as Japan’s first female PM exposes how representation without ideological diversity can still reinforce the status quo. Her nationalist stance complicates the narrative of progress. It’s a useful case study in why “firsts” matter symbolically but not structurally. Systems don’t evolve by optics; they evolve by distribution of power.

9. Perplexity at Work — Perplexity Labs
This shows how structured prompting and model chaining turn research into insight generation. The bigger story is cultural: the skill gap is no longer between people who know facts and those who don’t, but between those who translate knowledge into action. AI is accelerating the return of apprenticeship thinking: learning by doing, iterating, and interrogating.

10. WHOOP 2025 Healthspan White Paper
WHOOP’s “Pace of Aging” metric quantifies how behavior compounds biologically. It’s fascinating because it reframes health as a trajectory rather than a state, which is the same shift finance underwent decades ago. The philosophical tension: once longevity becomes a performance variable, wellness stops being about wellbeing and becomes about optimization. The next moral frontier in health tech is deciding what enough looks like.

11. Quantum Echoes: Willow and Verifiable Quantum Advantage — Google Research Blog
Google demonstrates a verifiable quantum advantage: computation now provably faster than any classical alternative. The milestone matters less for what it computes and more for what it implies: verification is the bridge between hype and application. Quantum is finally entering its “internet in 1993” phase. Mostly invisible, but rewriting physics into engineering.

12. Why Mesopotamia Became the Cradle of Civilization — Jiang Xueqin Lecture
Xueqin’s lecture argues that geography shapes belief, and belief shapes innovation. Egypt’s calm Nile bred stability; Mesopotamia’s chaos bred invention. It’s a clean historical example of creative pressure: uncertainty forces adaptation. The same logic applies to today’s economies: predictability breeds comfort; volatility breeds breakthroughs. The question is how to design volatility that educates rather than destroys.

13. The Price of E. coli — Asimov Press
Sam Clamons runs a thought experiment: if we priced every molecule in E. coli individually, a single liter would be worth $600,000. We systematically undervalue complexity because it’s invisible. The piece reframes biology as manufacturing, and life as a distributed nanofactory that no startup could replicate. It’s an argument for humility in the age of synthetic everything.

14. How to Double Your Luck — High Agency Essays
A concise framework for engineering serendipity: increase surface area, reduce optionality anxiety, and follow curiosity into public spaces. It’s less self-help than systems thinking. Reading it alongside the QJE paper above, it’s clear: our environments decide more about our outcomes than our intentions do.

15. Stellan Skarsgård in Conversation — Vulture
Skarsgård’s reflections on acting reveal a broader principle: mastery without self-importance. He talks about working, aging, and why he rejects the idea of “transformation” in acting. You’re not becoming someone else; you’re revealing parts of yourself that fit the moment. That’s a useful mental model for leadership, creativity, and even learning: stop performing depth; inhabit it.

16. Honesty in Relationships — Ava Bear
A straightforward but piercing essay on honesty as a skill rather than a virtue. Ava Bear argues that most “radical honesty” collapses under the weight of unprocessed emotion. True transparency isn’t oversharing; it’s communicating without weaponizing. The insight generalizes to teams and organizations: clarity requires regulation, not catharsis.

17. Why Handlooms Should Not Be Preserved — Nitin Mehrotra
Mehrotra’s essay challenges the heritage economy head-on. He argues that the handloom sector’s sanctification has frozen it in time, preventing artisans from participating in progress. Preservation, he says, often masks moral comfort for elites. It’s a tough but necessary read for anyone romanticizing “craft.” The lesson: nostalgia is rarely equitable.

18. ChatGPT’s Retention Curve — Deedy Das
Deedy’s data shows ChatGPT’s one-month retention now exceeds YouTube’s, a signal that AI has shifted from novelty to infrastructure. Retention here is a proxy for cultural evidence of integration. We’re no longer experimenting with AI. We’re depending on it. The open question is whether dependency translates to capability or complacency.

What connects a Chinese university’s phone study, a fintech model, a biological cost analysis, and a sociological essay about Gen Z isn’t subject matter. It’s feedback. Each one shows how individual behavior is both a product and a driver of larger systems: we design incentives, then they, in turn, redesign us.

The temptation is to moralize this, to say technology is bad, or that youth are lost, or that data has gone too far. But these systems aren’t inherently corrupt; they’re just incomplete. They measure what’s easy, not what’s important. They optimize for continuity, not coherence.

Our job, whether as operators, builders, or thinkers, is to reintroduce friction and context where efficiency has erased both. To remember that not every loop should be closed, not every pattern should be reinforced, and not every behavior should be scalable.

Because the systems that define the next decade won’t just be the ones that work fastest. They’ll be the ones that leave room for people to think before they respond.