Reading as a second career.

Growing up I drew pictures — mostly sports stars, whose autographs I collected at games. That obsession took me to the California College of the Arts, where I studied illustration. After school I drifted out of making images and into operations work at Postmates and then Twitter, helping build and label the data sets that trained machine learning models. On the side I taught myself what was then called user experience design, now product design, and since then I've spent my professional life designing internal tools for healthcare.

Reading, for most of that stretch, was something I did when I had time. It didn't become a practice until the end of my two years in New York. 12 Years a Slave is the book that flipped the switch — it gave me an appetite for nonfiction and history I hadn't known I had, and it taught me that a good book is, in some important way, a conversation with someone who is no longer around. That's the line I keep coming back to. The books that matter most to me are the ones that let me sit with people I will never meet, and let their way of seeing begin to reshape mine.

I've moved a lot.

Each move has changed what I read, and what I read has changed how I experience where I live. Nashville and Franklin sharpened the Civil Rights reading. Chicago, I already know, is going to sharpen the Black history reading and a lot else besides. The site's color palette is a small gesture in that direction.

Working in technology, I spend a lot of time thinking about empathy — specifically, whether the systems we're building have any. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is being used and will be used in military contexts where substantial loss of innocent life is expected. A "constitution" for an AI model — a set of principles and guardrails — is a real and useful thing, but it is not the same as empathy. Empathy is deeper than that. It's what reading has, for me, been slowly and quietly constructing over the last several years.

American society would benefit from a different relationship between profit and empathy — one in which empathy sits closer to the structural logic than the decorative trim. I don't think reading books is a substitute for that kind of change, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But the work of sitting with someone else's experience, of letting a Palestinian journalist or a formerly enslaved man or a novelist writing about Appalachian poverty actually rearrange how I understand a situation — that work is, in my view, related to the work.

This site is a place to keep track of that work. The books that have mattered enough to earn a spot. The topics I've read enough on to feel like I can speak about with any care. The dashboards I've built when the reading made me want to see the shape of the numbers. And, honestly, an invitation — if you've read a book that changed how you see something, I'd love to hear about it.

— Cody Heart