Notes on 2026 – Week 1

I thought I'd start a weekly post to try and get into a rhythm with putting stuff out there again. I only managed to write one post in 2025, even though at the end of 2024 I set a new year's resolution to share more. Let's pretend 2025 didn't happen, and I actually do manage to share more thoughts in 2026.

What I've been reading this week

I'm currently reading at least four books in parallel:

Reading the first two books in parallel is actually quite fun. How Life Works is a narrative of what we know about biology and DNA, and it's a nice contrast to the textbook style of Introduction to Biotechnology that just describes everything matter-of-factly. Philip Ball was an editor the journal Nature for over twenty years, so when he describes things like introns you get to learn how we came to know they exist and how much exactly we know about them, instead of just seeing them annotated in a figure with a short explanation. I even learned that there is a Star Trek TNG episode called Genesis (Season 7, Episode 19) where crew members have their introns activated at random, causing them to devolve.

The PARA Method is a way of organizing digital information by Tiago Forte, the same guy who wrote Building a Second Brain. It's a short read, and I hope to be able to apply the methods in the book successfully. Something from the book that I found insightful is that it takes time and effort to make private notes shareable. Without adding context and additional definitions, private notes won't make much sense for others. For that reason, it makes most sense to put it the time and effort to share your notes when they're about something you're working on collaboratively with others.

Behemoth is about manufacturing, and it's taking me a while to get through it. I've thought about just abandoning it a couple of times, but every time I read from it I do feel like I'm learning something.

Highlights from this week

And with that I don't necessarily mean personal highlights, but things I've highlighted in articles or books I've read.

From How I rebooted my social life:

If I wanted a community, then I could build it myself. I mean, in principle, it shouldn’t be too hard to do. Community has been the foundation of all of human society since the dawn of our species, so the playbook for how to build one had already been figured out. I think it boils down to a few key ingredients: a community needs a common connection or interest. It needs a place for people to interact informally. And it needs a mechanism for new people to join, to prevent it from decaying over time.

From The Punk Rock Good Life:

Reading books before bed serves me. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Cooking hearty, protein-rich, simple meals serves me. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Buying new stuff rarely serves me, while repurposing old stuff or making my own stuff generally does.

Thoughts

I don't know if anyone else would find these writings useful. I'm not really planning on starting a newsletter – I just want a place to record what I'm doing, and do so publicly so that I'm forced to make it somewhat coherent. If there's ways you think I can improve, let me know in the comments!

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