Living values

An annotated reading of the books I finished in December 2025.

Weather or not, here’s December’s reading list:

Books Read in December 2025

1. The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
2. What We Value
3. Moral Ambition

Revisiting old writings

The founding documents of the United States of America continue to shape how Americans think about how democracies should be run. However, like many Americans, I have forgotten the nuances of how these documents were written and the intentions behind them according to each author. Fortunately, Walter Isaacson realized this growing knowledge gap between theory and practice in the American democratic system and wrote a short account on America’s founding documents, highlighting how each author thought about (and maybe even practiced) the values presented in these documents. To paraphrase Yuval Noah Harari, history is an evolving topic rooted in the past, present, and future, and Isaacson’s latest book entry serves a specific purpose in reminding us of this fact.

The neuroscience of beliefs and values

How does our (neuro)biology inform what we believe and how we act in accordance with those beliefs? And how can we change our beliefs/values if we are not satisfied with the set we are currently working with? Emily Falk explores these questions by synthesizing several research studies, some of which her research lab has led, on the intersection of neuroscience and human behavior and values. If you are curious about which brain regions and mechanisms are (likely) responsible for different short and long-term value calculations we all make (e.g., in everyday as well as extreme planning scenarios), this book will scratch some of that itch. Who knows? Maybe even some of your values might change as a result!

Shaping a career around values

Rutger Bregman makes a striking point in his book Moral Ambition: In the year 2025, we as humanity can do better to set more ambitious goals that, if achieved, would benefit us all. Think: revitalization of medicine, engineering, science, discovery, entrepreneurship, and policy making. It is so easy to focus on optimizing an individual’s quality of life (e.g., more income = greater stress buffer, more prestige = greater career mobility and flexibility) and to miss the “humankind forest for the individual trees”. In the West, this is largely the air we breathe: individual optimization over collective collaboration. There are pros and cons of both societal philosophies, but the argument Bregman makes in this book is that more of us could be shaping our careers around common societal goals and values that are not zero-sum propositions. Whether you agree with each of Bregman’s assertions or not, hopefully you will find that this work can challenge your beliefs about what’s possible when more people choose to pursue individual + moral ambition over simply individual ambition.

Alex