Overview
- Gates published the picks on Nov. 25 via Gates Notes, saying each choice "pulls back the curtain on how something important really works."
- The selections are Remarkably Bright Creatures; Clearing the Air; Who Knew; When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows; and Abundance.
- He calls Hannah Ritchie's Clearing the Air one of the clearest climate overviews he has read, noting its 50-question structure and data-driven answers.
- On Shelby Van Pelt's novel, he says it helped him make sense of aging, while he deems Steven Pinker's new book a must-read on how common knowledge shapes communication.
- He describes Barry Diller's memoir as raw and honest, noting Diller's public coming-out earlier this year, and he backs Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance for its diagnosis of U.S. building bottlenecks and proposed abundance agenda.