Wisereads Vol. 116 — How Not to Waste Your Life by Maria Popova, The Scarlet Letter, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of Heather and Douglas Boneparth's new release, Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team. This week, we're sharing an American classic perfect for fall: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. 

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Over the past year, Ultralearning author Scott Young read 102 books. Now, he's sharing a key insight from each, covering topics from reading and money to productivity and health: "Regular exercise cuts your risk of an early death by 40%, roughly the same benefit as quitting smoking," and "Donating money to the most effective charities, it takes roughly $3500-$5000 to save a person’s life."

Shrivu Shankar's Abnormal AI team consumes billions of tokens each month. Along the way, he’s picked up some hard-won lessons on using Claude Code, including: "Treat your CLAUDE.md as a high-level, curated set of guardrails and pointers" and "Don’t Just Say 'Never.' Avoid negative-only constraints like 'Never use the --foo-bar flag.' The agent will get stuck when it thinks it must use that flag. Always provide an alternative."

Essayist Maria Popova explores a selection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essays and notebook entries, including one that evolved into The Scarlet Letter and others reflecting on what it means to truly live. "Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful."

In Every’s "AI and I" series, Dan Shipper interviews Anthropic’s Cat and Boris, creators of Claude Code. "I think one of the really cool things about Claude Code being a terminal UI, and what made it work really well, is that Claude Code has access to everything that an engineer does at the terminal... It just means that okay, everything you can do, Claude Code can do. There's nothing in between."

Greg Isenberg shares predictions on how AI will reshape employment, livestreaming, commerce, data privacy, and more. Two key takeaways: "The internet used to reward consistency. the new internet rewards experimentation. the faster you test, the faster you compound" and "an AI glut means deflation everywhere except in ideas. when intelligence is free, originality becomes priceless."

After First Brands' recent bankruptcy filing, Oaktree Capital cofounder Howard Marks reminds investors that losses are a normal part of taking risk. "In other words, many flawed decisions, which the economist Friedrich Hayek aptly described as 'malinvestment,' are made in booms and exposed in busts. It will ever be so. This is summed up most concisely in a great banking adage: 'The worst of loans are made in the best of times.'"

Following Maria Popova’s exploration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journals, we’re reminded of his best-known work, an American classic perfect for fall: The Scarlet Letter. With its atmospheric portrait of Puritan New England and its searching inquiry into guilt, revenge, and integrity, it's a short novel that endures.

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."

This edition of The Scarlet Letter is available through Standard Ebooks. Explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

On The Science of Being, Lina writes lyrical essays on empathy, boundaries, and the stories that hold us. From the appetite of empathy: "the thorns and rocks have cut and battered me but i remain absurdly loyal to my empathy. i understand what damage feels like, and i understand this equally well. love cannot be held too tightly without losing what makes it love."