The whole site · July 18, 2026 · the site's reading room
Additional readings.
Every page on this site opens a subject that serious people have spent whole careers on: owning your records, privacy, prevention, caring for family, the economics of health, work itself. This page is the reading room, where we point past ourselves to the books, reports, and official guides worth your hours — one section per subject, matched to the rooms of this site. Nothing here is sponsored. No link earns us anything. No book is listed that doesn't belong.
"Information alone is not enough to effect change."— from the founder's notebooks. The sentence is why this site builds tools as well as pages. A book at the right moment is a tool too. This room is for those books.
Owning your records
Privacy & message delivery
Doing things together
Prevention
Family & the long chapters
Work & layoffs
The economy underneath
Preventing fraud, waste, and abuse
AI, told straight
For builders
From the founder's desk
How this room works
Each book appears in one section, with one plain line about why it belongs. Books are listed without links; a library or bookshop can find any of them from the title and author. We name no stores, so no store was chosen for you. Official sources — the government pages that publish the actual rules — appear in their own boxes, linked at each site's front page only. The founder curates this room by hand, from thirty years inside health and technology and a reading archive of thousands of saved pieces. That archive is still being cataloged, so this room grows. Read something that belongs here? On the main site: Write to us → "feedback."
Owning your records
Serves: Keeping Your Data Safe with AI Tools · What the archive does · What we built
The Digital Doctor — Robert Wachter (2015). How medicine got computers and what it lost in the bargain — the inside account of why your records ended up scattered and unreadable.
Deep Medicine — Eric Topol (2019). A cardiologist's case that AI's real gift to medicine would be returning time and attention to patients — if the data serves them.
Let Patients Help! — Dave deBronkart with Danny Sands (2013). The e-patient movement's field manual: short, blunt, and a decade ahead of everyone on why patients need their own data.
The official sources
HHS.gov — the federal right of access: your legal right to copies of your medical records, what providers may charge, and how to complain when they stall. Search "HIPAA right of access."
Privacy, and how notes travel
Serves: Privacy · Message Delivery · Texting, together · Reminders
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff (2019). The big map of the extraction economy for personal data — long, angry, and the vocabulary everyone now argues with.
Data and Goliath — Bruce Schneier (2015). A security engineer's plain accounting of who collects what and what it costs us; the practical companion to Zuboff's map.
Privacy Is Power — Carissa Véliz (2020). A short, sharp moral argument that privacy is collective power — the closest book to this site's own doctrine.
Doing things together
Serves: Making plans, together · Offering together · Activate the family
Governing the Commons — Elinor Ostrom (1990). The Nobel-winning proof that communities can manage shared resources without either markets or states — the theory underneath everything this site calls "the commons."
Bowling Alone — Robert Putnam (2000). The famous ledger of America's lost habits of association — the deficit every "together" page on this site was written to repay.
Mutual Aid — Dean Spade (2020). A small handbook on organizing help among neighbors without waiting for institutions — read it beside our buying circles.
Staying ahead of illness
Serves: Your lifetime prevention schedule
Outlive — Peter Attia (2023). The current standard-bearer for prevention-first thinking about the long diseases; take its enthusiasm with your own clinician.
The Health Gap — Michael Marmot (2015). Why zip code and job grade predict health better than genes do — prevention's uncomfortable, essential context.
Overdiagnosed — H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz & Steven Woloshin (2011). The counterweight: how screening can harm as well as help. This section would be incomplete without it.
Being Mortal — Atul Gawande (2014). What medicine should aim for when cure is no longer possible, and how "staying ahead" changes late in life.
Caring for family, and the long chapters
Serves: Activate the family · the "I'm caring for someone" door on the main site
Elderhood — Louise Aronson (2019). A geriatrician's argument that old age is a third act deserving its own medicine.
The 36-Hour Day — Nancy Mace & Peter Rabins (1981, updated since). Four decades of editions and still the book dementia caregivers hand each other.
The Age of Dignity — Ai-jen Poo (2015). The care economy seen whole: who does the work of eldercare in America, what they're paid, and what dignity would cost.
The official sources
Eldercare Locator — the federal front door for finding local aging services: meals, transport, respite, area agencies on aging.
Work: layoffs, the future of work, working as we age
Serves: When work changes · Ways to work together
The Disposable American — Louis Uchitelle (2006). The reporting that named layoffs as a system — and counted what they do to the people inside them.
Bait and Switch — Barbara Ehrenreich (2005). She went undercover into the white-collar job search and found an industry selling hope to the laid-off. Bleak, funny, and still accurate.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism — Anne Case & Angus Deaton (2020). The economists who found the mortality signal: what happens to a generation's health when its work disappears.
Dying for a Paycheck — Jeffrey Pfeffer (2018). The evidence that workplace practices (insecurity, hours, the layoff itself) are a public-health exposure nobody regulates.
Nomadland — Jessica Bruder (2017). Older Americans working the seasonal-labor circuit out of vans — the future of work that already arrived for people the economy pushed out.
Working — Studs Terkel (1974). A hundred Americans saying what work actually is. Fifty years old and still the best baseline for every "future of work" claim.
Gigged — Sarah Kessler (2018). What the gig economy promised and what it paid — the cautionary template we refuse to repeat on our economics page.
On the Clock — Emily Guendelsberger (2019). She worked the algorithmically-managed jobs (warehouse, call center, fast food) and wrote down what they do to a human body and attention.
The Technology Trap — Carl Benedikt Frey (2019). The long history of automation's winners and losers — and why the transition generations pay the bill.
Power and Progress — Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson (2023). A thousand years of evidence that technology raises everyone's boat only when institutions force it to — the argument for building structures like ours on purpose.
The 100-Year Life — Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott (2016). If working lives run fifty-plus years, the three-stage plan (school, career, retirement) is dead. The planning book for the long arc.
Wisdom at Work — Chip Conley (2018). The case for the "modern elder" — experience as a workplace asset, written by someone who lived the second act.
This Chair Rocks — Ashton Applewhite (2016). A manifesto against ageism, aimed at the story (older worker as burden) that produces the fifty-six-percent statistic.
The over-fifty push-out analysis — ProPublica & the Urban Institute (December 2018). The longitudinal finding quoted on our work page: fifty-six percent of workers over fifty pushed out of long-held jobs before they chose to leave. At propublica.org and urban.org.
The official sources — the rules, from where they are published
DOL.gov — COBRA continuation coverage: the bridge that lets you keep an employer plan at full price, and its deadlines. Search "COBRA continuation."
HealthCare.gov — losing job-based coverage opens a special enrollment window to buy your own plan; this is where, and for how long.
Medicare.gov — working past sixty-five: the enrollment windows, the penalties, and how employer coverage changes the timing.
SSA.gov — retirement and disability benefits, and the earnings record worth checking long before you need it.
Money, and the economy underneath
Serves: Ways to work together · Buying, together · Buying circles
An American Sickness — Elisabeth Rosenthal (2017). How American health care became a business, symptom by symptom, with the billing codes to prove it.
Banker to the Poor — Muhammad Yunus (1999). Microfinance from its inventor — the village-scale proof, quoted in our own essay, that small capital in trusted hands outperforms the banks.
Owning Our Future — Marjorie Kelly (2012). The design catalog of ownership itself: steward-ownership, cooperatives, commons — the menu we ordered from when we designed our own structure.
Preventing fraud, waste, and abuse
Serves: Preventing fraud, waste, and abuse
Never Pay the First Bill — Marshall Allen (2021). A working manual for fighting billing errors and inflated charges — consumer self-defense from a reporter who spent a career on health-care waste.
How We Do Harm — Otis Brawley with Paul Goldberg (2011). An oncologist on both kinds of failure (overtreating the insured and abandoning the uninsured), written from inside the system he indicts.
AI: benefits, limits, and harms
Serves: AI Commons · AI research library · How we use AI · AI governance · Keeping Your Data Safe with AI Tools
Weapons of Math Destruction — Cathy O'Neil (2016). Where opaque scoring goes wrong (hiring, credit, insurance) and the accountability rules we hold our own AI pages to.
The Alignment Problem — Brian Christian (2020). The clearest tour of how machine-learning systems miss what we meant — essential background for trusting any AI with anything.
Atlas of AI — Kate Crawford (2021). AI as an extraction industry: minerals, labor, data — the wide-angle lens behind our data-center page and our economics.
For people who build
Serves: For builders · Solution architecture · The Global Registry
The Cathedral and the Bazaar — Eric S. Raymond (1999). The founding argument for building in the open — with all its era's blind spots, still the reference point.
Working in Public — Nadia Eghbal (2020). What actually sustains open-source work (the maintenance, the money, the burnout), required reading before anyone promises "the community will maintain it."
From the founder's desk
The writing this site grew out of.
Keeping Your Data Safe with AI Tools — (2026). The platform field guide — on this site.
The [kisop] essay series — at carmenw.com (2023–2025). The vision, the system overview, the private repository, the distributed architecture — the public record of this project's thinking, dated as it happened.
Health You Own — (2026, finishing its passes). The companion essay on owning your health data. We will link it here, dated, the day it's public.
Where this room stands
This is a first version of the room. We assembled it July 18, 2026. Carmen's review is still pending — she reads more widely than this page yet shows, and her archive of saved reading runs to thousands of pieces, still being cataloged into these sections. The 📋 on the site map stays until she completes that review.
Our promises hold here too: nothing sponsored, no affiliate links, no tracking on this page or any other. A book's place here can't be bought.