This was such a fun book to read. Cédric Villani offers a mix of memoir, dream diary, and narrative, all centered around the unfiltered process of discovering and proving a new mathematical theorem. I particularly appreciated the insight into the daily life, the ebbs and flows and rhythms, of an intellect of the highest degree. Villani plays with his children, cooks for his wife, manages the administrivia of leading an organization.
Book: Red Notice
Bill Browder’s Red Notice reads like a thriller - and offers a salient view into human rights abuses by Putin’s regime.
The autobiography covers Browder’s family of left-wing mathematicians, his rebellious embrace of capitalism, and his career culminating in a successful Russia-focused hedge fund by the late 1990s. Investing in formerly state-owned enterprises led to some spectacular successes for Browder’s fund. Fighting corruption in the Russian court system was also initially successful. Within a few years, however, Browder and his team saw increased harrassment by various arms of the Russian state, from stonewalling in court proceedings to police raids and death threats.
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Health insurance costs, visualized
Shopping for health insurance is a confusing experience. There’s a new vocabulary to learn, and it’s not obvious what the most important decisions are. A typical “summary of benefits” for a plan runs nine pages, and comparing it to other plans is difficult. I saw a lot of complexity regarding the types of health care services that are within the scope of a particular health insurance plan, which ones might apply to me and my family, and how much those services cost.
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Utah 50k ultra-marathon
Leading up to my first 50k, I read a bunch of books, articles, magazines, and blog posts. Suffering was one common theme. Nausea, lost toenails, emotional rollercoasters, running through pain… I was a little nervous toeing the line to an ultra-marathon, having never run a marathon before.
The first few miles went by smoothly. The altitude was a bit of an issue. I’d been training at sea level in Boston all summer. Park City is at 7,000 feet of elevation, and the race summited at 10,000′. Two and a half hours into the morning, after nine miles of uphill hiking, I got up to ~9,000′. That’s about when my headache started. For the next four hours or so, until I got back down below 8,000′, I had a tradeoff between hiking/running at my target heart rate, or slowing down and decreasing the headache.