Wisereads Vol. 122 — Derek Thompson's 26 ideas for 2026, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new Substack, and more

Last week, we shared an exclusive full debut from practical philosopher, Andrew Taggart: Chop Wood, Carry Water. This week, we’re sharing the autobiography of the father of the self-help genre, Benjamin Franklin.

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Writer Joan Westenberg invites readers to embrace "thick" desires, the kind that transform you, over "thin" ones that leave you unchanged. In her case, it’s the act of making bread: "You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away."

Journalist Derek Thompson revisits his most successful essays of the year, gathering 26 insights he believes will shape the year ahead. From media and tech: "At this rate, the AI build-out will outspend the entire Apollo program, every year, despite being financed by the private sector," to entertainment and medicine: "The age of alcohol is over, and the future looks ominously like hundreds of millions of people getting high alone rather than getting tipsy together."

First, software ate the world. Now, agentic AI is eating software, argues engineer Martin Alderson. He weighs in on which SaaS companies still have a moat and which are at risk: "If your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent."

Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explores caffeine’s role as a behavioral reinforcer that, when used intentionally, can support cognitive and physical performance, as well as mood. "Not surprisingly, the large-scale analyses of the relationship between depression and caffeine show that, provided people are not drinking so much caffeine that it makes them overly anxious, regular intake of caffeine is inversely related to levels of depression."

You’ve likely heard that constraints fuel creativity, but Linear cofounder Karri Saarinen sees it differently. In early design phases, he warns against rigid toolsets that stifle exploration: "Use whatever tools you want, but be deliberate about what mode you are in. Protect exploration from premature constraint. Invite constraints when you are ready to learn from them. Use code as feedback, not as a cage."

In his 2007 talk in Italy, Turing Award winner Alan Kay argued that the next major leap in computing would take place in education, particularly in the minds of young people. "The enlightenment of some has led to communities of outlook, knowledge, wealth, commerce, and energy that help the less enlightened behave better. It is not at all a coincidence that the first part of this real revolution in society was powered by the printing press. The next revolutions in thought – such as whole systems thinking and planning leading to major new changes in outlook – will be powered by the real computer revolution – and it could come just in time to win over catastrophe." 

You probably know Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of bifocals, swim fins, and the lightning rod. We also have him to thank for the first circulating library and the first volunteer fire department. But few people realize this founding father also sired the self-help genre.

Franklin grew up poor, but thanks to hard work (what he calls "industry"), ingenuity, and a little bit of luck, he became one of the most influential figures in history. His autobiography tells the story of how this happened. Despite being written in the 1700s, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin remains remarkably relevant and readable to this day.

"Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas."

This edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their ever-expanding collection of carefully formatted, high quality, and free public domain ebooks here.

Statistician and Antifragile author Nassim Nicholas Taleb launched a new Substack, where he’s sharing essays and lectures on probability, applications, and inferential rigor. From The World in Which We Live: "In biology and economics, entities grow in a convex way, then slow as they saturate — growth may be unbounded, but remains sub-logarithmic. Once you have a two-car garage, do you need a five-car garage? Some might, but most don’t — the incentive diminishes."