The Saga of Silk Road

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

In 1994, a young programmer named Jeff Bezos took a chance, quit his job, and founded the first online bookstore. Three decades later, his business—Amazon—is valued at over $1 trillion and has revolutionized the online marketplace. Invent and Wander is a compilation of Bezos’s letters to Amazon shareholders, combined with excerpts from interviews and speeches. Its narrative chronicles Amazon’s rise from a niche retailer to a digital superstore while also illustrating Bezos’s values and insights into innovation and success.

In this guide, we’ll explore the history of Amazon as it grew to a thriving online marketplace that also became an invaluable resource for cloud-based computing. We’ll delve into the principles that Bezos says are central to Amazon’s success and compare Bezos’s management decisions with those of his contemporaries. Since Bezos presents an insider’s view of Amazon, we’ll also hear from outside voices who are critical of Bezos’s leadership style and Amazon’s impact on the market.

Chinese firms have pioneered a different approach to online shopping than Western firms, blending e-commerce with everything from social media to gaming to financial services within the same apps. Western companies can learn a thing or two.

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

In just a few years, Sam Bankman-Fried went from being a relative nobody to the architect of a cryptocurrency empire whose net worth neared $30 billion. But, even quicker than his empire burst onto the scene, it crumbled in November 2022 with the news that his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had lost nearly $10 billion of its clients’ money. In Going Infinite (2023), financial journalist Michael Lewis provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Bankman-Fried’s meteoric rise and fall. And although Bankman-Fried has been convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, Lewis suggests that the case against Bankman-Fried is less damning than outsiders believe.

In this guide, we’ll break down Going Infinite into three main parts, first examining Lewis’s portrayal of the enigmatic Bankman-Fried himself before proceeding to the rise and precipitous collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. We’ll also discuss alternative accounts of Bankman-Fried’s actions at FTX and dive deeper into the nature of cryptocurrency that lay at the heart of FTX.

Malware researcher Marcus Hutchins first found fame as the “hero” who thwarted the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack. However, just a few months after the attack, revelations about his past criminal activities threatened to end his budding career.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of STELLARWIND, the US government’s mass surveillance program. Until Snowden revealed the program, the US government was recording the phone and computer activities of nearly everyone in the world.

In Permanent Record, Snowden explains how he became involved with the government, how he learned about the mass surveillance program, and how he ultimately made the decision to speak up—a decision that would change his life, and the lives of everyone who uses the Internet, forever.

“Sex, drugs, and stock manipulation” are the words that describe the world of Jordan Belfort and his brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. Belfort and his staff of young traders became incredibly rich via illegal trading practices, then used their wealth to indulge their every hedonistic whim. The Wolf of Wall Street is Belfort’s confessional memoir of his illegal actions, which led to a self-destructive spiral into drug addiction and life-threatening behavior.

In this guide, we’ll explain how Belfort grew his wealth through stock manipulation and money laundering, how he attempted to evade prosecution for his crimes, and how his lifestyle of drug abuse and self-indulgence almost killed him before he accepted the need to change. This guide will also examine whether Belfort’s crimes are still commonplace in modern finance, how the acquisition of wealth affects people, and how drug addiction and recovery can alter a person’s self-awareness and sense of accountability.

In The Bitcoin Standard, economics professor Saifedean Ammous suggests that bitcoin has the potential to become a new international monetary standard, similar to the gold standard of the 1800s. But the Bitcoin Standard would be superior to the gold standard in a number of ways because the properties of bitcoin make it—at least potentially—a superior form of money to gold, while also solving many of the problems with the fiat currencies that countries have been using since they got off the gold standard. In this guide, we’ll describe Ammous’s vision for a global Bitcoin Standard and look at how close we might be to implementing it. We’ll also compare Ammous’s perspective to that of other thinkers, such as Edward Griffin and Milton Friedman.

Born into poverty, Billy Walters accrued a net worth north of $100 million by gambling on sports. In his autobiography, Gambler, Walters tells his remarkable life story and reveals the secrets behind his approach to sports betting.

In this guide, we’ll start by discussing Walters’s childhood and adolescence in rural Kentucky. Next, we’ll examine his early adult years, which saw him married and divorced by age 21 and working incessantly to support two children. Then, we’ll turn toward Walters’s time in Las Vegas and how he ultimately formed his own sports betting business that netted millions annually. Finally, we’ll examine Walters’s legal troubles, culminating in his 2017 conviction for insider trading.

Our commentary will go into more detail about the major influences in Walters’s youth, such as the effects of early exposure to alcohol and gambling. We’ll also explain what became of some of the major people and companies in Walters’s life that he doesn’t cover in the text. Finally, we’ll explore legal and ethical concerns about Walters’s lifestyle as a high-stakes gambler.

In this New York Times bestseller, Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs has created a new racial caste system, disproportionately punishing black people. A powerfully interlocking system of laws and policies targets black people for drug crime, punishes them more severely than white criminals, and makes life as an ex-felon extremely difficult. The result is effectively racial subjugation and disenfranchisement.

In this summary, you’ll learn how the war on drugs followed a pattern of implementation consistent with slavery and Jim Crow, how financial incentives and legal protection allow selective targeting of black males for drug crimes, and why it’s so difficult for drug convicts to reintegrate into society.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is about the Osage Reign of Terror—the 1920s organized killings of members of the oil-rich Osage Indians. Powerful and bigoted whites systematically exploited and murdered the Osage people to expropriate their wealth, showing us the horrors that result when racism and greed align. The murders were also a major catalyst for the growth of the FBI, and the triumph of its rational and scientific vision of law enforcement—and a shift away from the era of frontier justice, corrupt and incompetent local sheriffs, and rogue “lawmen.”

Over a half-century after the civil rights movement sought justice for African Americans, prominent movements such as Black Lives Matter continue fighting to expose and resist injustice. In this social landscape, Bryan Stevenson’s message is timely: The US justice system consistently denies justice to society’s most vulnerable members.

In his 2014 book, Just Mercy, Stevenson examines the justice system’s pervasive failures toward marginalized populations, especially Black Americans. To illustrate these failures, Stevenson discusses numerous criminal cases, most prominently the 1989 case of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Alabama.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Stevenson’s analysis of the McMillian case and his evidence of extreme punishments doled out more broadly by the justice system. Moreover, we’ll consider Stevenson’s diagnosis of the root problems with the American conception of justice and his suggestions for repairing it. We’ll also examine arguments from other sources about how to improve the justice system and provide further context for the cases that Stevenson cites.

Born into poverty, Billy Walters accrued a net worth north of $100 million by gambling on sports. In his autobiography, Gambler, Walters tells his remarkable life story and reveals the secrets behind his approach to sports betting.

In this guide, we’ll start by discussing Walters’s childhood and adolescence in rural Kentucky. Next, we’ll examine his early adult years, which saw him married and divorced by age 21 and working incessantly to support two children. Then, we’ll turn toward Walters’s time in Las Vegas and how he ultimately formed his own sports betting business that netted millions annually. Finally, we’ll examine Walters’s legal troubles, culminating in his 2017 conviction for insider trading.

Our commentary will go into more detail about the major influences in Walters’s youth, such as the effects of early exposure to alcohol and gambling. We’ll also explain what became of some of the major people and companies in Walters’s life that he doesn’t cover in the text. Finally, we’ll explore legal and ethical concerns about Walters’s lifestyle as a high-stakes gambler.

Malware researcher Marcus Hutchins first found fame as the “hero” who thwarted the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack. However, just a few months after the attack, revelations about his past criminal activities threatened to end his budding career.