Working through this one right now, and it is basically Stanford design thinking pointed at your own life. The reframe that hooked me is building three different “Odyssey Plans” instead of melting down over the one correct answer. Self-help usually loses me by chapter two, but this keeps handing me exercises I actually stop and do. Full verdict once I finish it.

I went down a full Lorne rabbit hole this year and paired this with the documentary, which was maybe too much Lorne, but no regrets. Morrison’s reporting is unreal: every backstage myth you have heard plus a hundred you have not. It is long and earns most of that length. The thing that stuck with me is the central contradiction of the guy, a total control freak running the most chaotic live show on TV for fifty years. If you love SNL, this is the bible.

Yes I am a grown man who reads the Avatar tie-in novels, and yes I had a great time. Roku and Sozin starting as best friends and curdling into the original tragedy of that whole world is exactly the lore I wanted filled in. Ribay gives it real weight instead of phoning in a cash grab. Easy comfort read for anyone still not over that show.

Five stars, this one got me. Givhan nails why Abloh mattered: he kicked the doors of luxury wide open for a generation that looks like me and my friends instead of the old Paris guard. The more I sit with it the more convinced I am that he was becoming our Ralph Lauren, a designer whose whole language just IS America now (look at his fingerprints on the USMNT designs and how every brand still runs his playbook). The gut punch is how early we lost him, gone at 41 right as he was hitting another gear. Read it, then go look at everything he touched.

This is the book I keep pushing on people who are either panicking about AI or pretending it is a fad. As someone who lives in these tools all day, Mollick’s take is refreshingly practical: quit philosophizing and just invite the AI to the table to see where it actually helps. His “treat it like a person but remember it is not” framing finally gave me words for how I already work. Short, sharp, and it has aged way better than most tech books.