Oz Hassan's 3 favorite reads in 2024

This book made me laugh out loud with its very familiar examples — and then question every policy meeting, academic review, and "strategic plan" I’ve ever sat through. I wish the folks in our last management and finance meeting had read this!! Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy is a riotous, gloriously unhinged plea for embracing the messy, illogical, instinctive parts of ourselves when trying to solve problems. His argument? Logic is important but overrated, spreadsheets lie, and sometimes the most effective solutions come from a place closer to gut instinct than peer-reviewed evidence. Rationality needs to be balanced with creativity!

What I took away from it—aside from a sense that I might actually be quite a good alchemist and that's why I sometimes have to be very quiet when I am outnumbered —is that innovation requires risk and creativity. You have to be willing to get things wrong, to trust your hunches, and to question the very framing of the problem. The Red Bull example (why do people buy it even though it tastes awful? although I actually love sugar free red bull (so he is wrong on this)) is classic Sutherland: it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the story—and that story doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to work. Don't forget we are not robots but human beings, where meaning and context matter.

This isn’t a book full of dry theory; it’s a permission slip to be a bit weirder in our thinking. If you’re feeling hemmed in by sensible solutions and neat logics, Alchemy is a joyous reminder that magic sometimes beats logic—and that “nonsense” is often just originality in disguise.

This book is a godsend for anyone who’s ever stared blankly at their seventh Teams meeting of the day while mentally compiling a list of overdue articles, unanswered emails, unmarked assessments, and administrative "priorities" of ever-increasing urgency. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport takes aim at the cult of busyness and offers something radical: permission to do less, more slowly, and with greater care.

It’s not about laziness—it’s about sanity. Newport’s mantra, “do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality,” might as well be carved above the door of every overstretched academic office. His examples—from Jane Austen to Georgia O’Keeffe—remind us that the most enduring work often comes not from frantic multitasking but from sustained, focused, unhurried effort. As someone with multiple monographs on the go - this seems sensible. This book feels particularly urgent for those of us navigating modern academia, where the pressure to publish, teach, lead, review, supervise, and respond to every email within the hour can leave us burnt out and wondering whether anything we’re doing actually matters.

Slow Productivity doesn’t offer a hack; it offers a lifeline. It’s a reminder that deep work, real accomplishment, and personal wellbeing aren’t mutually exclusive—they just require us to step off the treadmill. Once again, we need to build this into the university system - and not be asked to do even more for less.

I’ll admit I came to this book a sceptic. Like many academics, I’ve long internalised the logics of expertise as outlined by K. Anders Ericsson—the idea that mastery is born of deep, deliberate practice over time. So Range, with its cheerful celebration of generalists and late bloomers, initially felt like it was picking a fight with something I hold dear. But it turned out to be less a rejection and more a reframing.

What Epstein offers is not a dismissal of expertise, but a reminder that deep knowledge applied in isolation can be brittle. His argument—that in a messy, fast-changing world, breadth matters—is hard to ignore. The best problem-solvers, he suggests, are those who can cross boundaries, borrow tools from one domain and apply them in another, and tolerate ambiguity. I came away with a renewed appreciation for the value of intellectual detours, of playing in unfamiliar sandpits, and of developing not just depth, but range. In practice, perhaps it isn’t a question of choosing between generalism and specialism—but of doing both, better.