Bookshelf
304 books across 13 years. The quake books are the ones that changed how I think.
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.
These are the books that fundamentally shifted my worldview — the ones I return to and reference constantly. Not the best books I've read, but the ones that left the deepest mark.
Every book tagged by topic — this is what feeds into the Portfolio Ideas pages.
A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world's most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them? The World Bank went looking at its own download statistics and found that nearly a third of its reports had never been downloaded even once, another 40% fewer than a hundred times, and only 13% more than 250 times. The final irony: the report about how nobody reads the reports was itself only available as a PDF.
A 1900 Tesla essay on harnessing the sun. GCHQ's own slide deck on discrediting people online. The inventory of every human body part in the British Museum. Facebook's internal culture book, which was never sold. A survey of what happened when the FAA sonic-boomed Oklahoma City eight times a day for six months. Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture, posted to arXiv and never submitted anywhere. A ten-page paper that is the sentence "get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated until it filled ten pages — and was then accepted by a journal. This is a library of documents worth keeping that mostly live one dead link away from gone; each is archived locally against link rot, and each card links to its original source.
A collection, not an endorsement. Much of it came from public threads asking for the internet's most underrated and rarest PDFs, so it is deliberately unfiltered — intelligence files, fringe tracts, corporate ephemera and primary sources sit next to each other on purpose. Archiving a document is not agreeing with it, and in several cases it is the opposite. Nothing here is hosted or redistributed.