The Bookshelf
The Reading Room holds the books written here. This holds the books written elsewhere — what the curator recommends, has skimmed and understood, or still needs to read. One rule, same as the whole house: nothing goes up he hasn't actually read or grasped. No padded shelf, no borrowed authority, no affiliate links. A recommendation you can't stand behind is just noise. The blanks are real, and they're his to fill.
📅 The next book — the curator's reading it first
The next book-club pick. House rule applies: no promotion of what hasn't been read yet, so the curator is reading it first. Read along — we meet when it's read.
TL;DR — Algorithms running modern life (credit, hiring, policing, college rankings, teacher pay, insurance, ads) quietly punish the already-bruised and call it math. Three traits define a WMD: opaque, scalable, damaging — and the damage compounds in feedback loops. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.
Cathy O'Neil — Harvard math PhD, ex-D.E. Shaw quant, watched 2008 from inside — names the class of model that breaks democracy without breaking a sweat: U.S. News rankings driving tuition inflation; predictive policing that arrests its way into "proving" itself; recidivism scores that punish you for being born poor; e-scores you can't see, can't appeal, and can't escape. Her fix is auditable math — modelers as professionals with ethical duties, algorithms that can be inspected by someone other than their owner. That's the academic cousin of this whole house: the One Lie clause leaves the lie visible; she calls for visibility by audit. The verdict either way is the same — only humans can score.
Why it's the next read: O'Neil's "models are opinions in math" IS the OHS thesis in a sister key. Her fix-the-model framing is the academic version of Fix-not-replacement. If you read it before me, save your questions for the meeting.
ETHICAL DISCLAIMER — The Amazon link above is a plain link, not an affiliate or referral link. OHS earns nothing from a purchase — no commission, no tracking, no kickback. The curator gets zero whether you buy it new, used, borrow it from the library, or torrent it (whatever you do is between you and your conscience). The link is a courtesy so you can find the book; the price you pay does not pay the house. This work is companionship work — to recover from the fake news of today.
✅ Recommend
Read, and stood behind.
TL;DR — Trust tested, not withheld; read the season, keep the receipts, enjoy your portion.
Discernment without cynicism. A man tried everything, was burned by all of it, saw clean through the vanity of it — and still landed on trust, work, eat your bread, enjoy your portion. It earns its hope by going through the disillusionment, not around it. Two are better than one; a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. The cure for trusting the wrong people was never trusting no one.
👓 Skimmed & understood
Got the thesis. Agree with it. Haven't read every page — and won't pretend I have.
TL;DR — Cloth got so cheap the work behind it went invisible — textile abundance + information asymmetry = the throwaway economy.
Textiles ran civilization — trade, chemistry, even binary code off the loom — and got so cheap and abundant the labor behind them went invisible. Postrel calls it textile amnesia. The thesis I agree with on contact: we live in textile abundance and information asymmetry at once — drowning in cheap cloth, blind to its true cost. The throwaway economy, explained by a sweater. (Found it through Hank Green.)
📋 Need to read
The honest to-read pile. On the shelf, not yet opened.
[ the curator's to-read list goes here — added in his own hand, never invented ]