Wisereads Vol. 119 — The Idea Machine by Joel J. Miller, Charli XCX on being a pop star, and more

Last week, we shared an excerpt from Nesrine Changuel’s Product Delight, a groundbreaking guide to making products stand out through surprise and joy. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview from Joel J. Miller's The Idea Machine, his latest release tracing the history and impact of our favorite technology: the book.

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An interesting companion to Kyla Scanlon’s piece from last week, investor and strategist Michael W. Green explores why the middle class feels poorer despite GDP growth. Drawing on Mollie Orshansky’s original poverty metric, he proposes a modern update: "If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality... the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200. It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000."

On her newly launched Substack, Brat artist Charli XCX writes candidly about the highs and lows of pop stardom and what she craves most from artists. "I want hedonism, danger and a sense of anti establishment to come along with my artists because when I was younger I wanted to escape through them. I don’t care if they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a persona or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds. To me that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY."

Open-source developer Armin Ronacher gets into the details of building smarter agents. "Every time the agent runs a tool you have the opportunity to not just return data that the tool produces, but also to feed more information back into the loop. For instance, you can remind the agent about the overall objective and the status of individual tasks. You can also provide hints about how the tool call might succeed when a tool fails."

Learn to love the grind with Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, who explains why managing your energy consistently across the week makes peak performance sustainable. "The concept of the weekend, I think, is one of the worst inventions in the history of humanity — arguably the worst one. We created this idea of the weekend where you get to recover from what we do to you during the week. The moment we created the weekend, we gave people license to absolutely chew through us during the week."

In honor of his 55th birthday, Kevin Dahlstrom shares the habits he’s compounded over time to feel and perform his best, covering everything from fitness: "Walk 15+ miles a week, even if you do other exercise. Humans are uniquely made to move slowly over long distances—it’s critical to longevity," to mindset: "Have a mindset of abundance. There is no advantage to being a pessimist—even if you’re right, it’s a miserable way to live. In a very real way… whatever you believe, you’re right!"

The team at OpenAI shares practical guidelines for speeding up the software development lifecycle with AI. "Teams that start with well-scoped tasks, invest in guardrails, and iteratively expand agent responsibility see meaningful gains in speed, consistency, and developer focus."

We’ve long been fascinated by the book as a form of technology, and former publishing VP Joel J. Miller shares that obsession. In The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, he explores the role of books in shaping civilization, using vivid storytelling, sharp insights, and compelling anecdotes.

"'Books are a uniquely portable magic,' novelist Stephen King once said. It’s an observation I take as confirmation of another, known as Clarke’s Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

We tend to equate books with mere information. In doing so, we miss that they are an information technology. And not just any information technology—no, in understanding how our world came to be, books emerge as an essential technology. Books are hardware as well as software, and it’s the combination that explains their peculiar power and effect."

We couldn't be more thrilled that Joel is sharing an exclusive two-chapter preview with Wisereads readers. If it resonates, you can order The Idea Machine here, fresh off the press.

This week’s author, Joel J. Miller, reflects on his recent reads and reading culture at large in his Substack, Miller's Book Review. From The Quiet Collapse of Reading—and the Only Real Solution: "The problem? Parents say they love books more than they do. Kids mimic what they observe, not what we say. When parents say kids should read but spend their own time doomscrolling political news on X or playing with face filters, kids notice. Only a quarter of kids observed their parents reading books, according to one study; meanwhile, more than half noticed Mom and Dad glued to social media."