As I’ve mentioned the past couple years, I went years without reading a book. I’d still read — Twitter, Reddit, blogs, newspapers, etc — but didn’t finish a book. That was a mistake. As engaging as Instagram reel slop can be, there’s something special about sitting down with genuinely long-form content. More and more of what we read these days is AI-generated, which makes (human-created) books even more important.

In 2025, I read 55 books. I mostly chose these based off of recommendations (primarily from in-person conversations), and keep a running list of books that I may want to read next. The recommendations I get are (normally) good, and it’s fun to be able tie a book to how you first heard of it. Given I rely so much on other people’s picks, I thought it’d be helpful for me to share my own.

I mostly read non-fiction. These are books that were new to me in 2025, so plenty of them are years (or even decades) old. I’ve highlighted five books were lesser known to me (e.g no cultural phenomenons or TV/Movie adaptations) that I particularly liked. Beyond that, I’m going to avoid including authors, blurbs, or my own personal thoughts. That’s partially laziness, but partially because it’s fun to pick books just off titles.

My Five Picks

1. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City

2. Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson

3. No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

4. Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion

5. Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media

The Rest

1. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

2. The Last Manager (How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball)

3. Flagrant Self-Destructive Gestures (A Biography of Denis Johnson)

4. The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us

5. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

6. Jesus’ Son: Stories (Picador Modern Classics Book 3)

7. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

8. Bel Canto: A Novel

9. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

10. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

11. Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story

12. Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer

13. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

14. Beautyland: A Novel

15. Priestdaddy: A Memoir

16. They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Store

17. Advantage Players: Inside the Winning World of Casino Virtuosos, Master Strategists, and Mathematical Wizards

18. Gomorrah

19. Beautiful Boy

20. Bukowski: A Life

21. Fun Home

22. Save Me a Seat – On the Road with Hello Dolly!

23. Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

24. Blood in the Water: The Untold Story of a Family Tragedy

25. The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place

26. Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly

27. The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

28. Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson

29. Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America

30. What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas

31. A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour

32. The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy

33. Care and Feeding: A Memoir – A Candid, Funny, and Devastating Story of the Food World and a Cultural Reckoning

34. The Racket

35. Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire

36. Meltdown: Greed, Scandal, and the Collapse of Credit Suisse

37. Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers

38. No Limit: The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Tower

39. Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas

40. The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit

41. Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy!

42. All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art

43. Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon

44. The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble

45. A Moveable Feast

46. Down and Out in Paris and London

47. The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America—An Epic Narco Story with Unmatched Intrigue and Corruption, Experience the Rise and Fall of a Drug Empire

48. The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty

49. The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World

50. Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops

The biggest impact on New Yorkers’ moods is the weather, the second is the Knicks. These past few weeks we’ve had (mostly) good weather and the Knicks winning close games. Last night, that fell apart.

The Knicks imploded at home. They blew a 14 point lead with three minutes left, and then lost in overtime. Their collapse was nasty, brutish, and short.

This year’s Knicks team, more than any other, embodies a New Yorker’s hopes and dreams. It’s a bunch of long-time friends coming together to outperform expectations, to make things happen in a difficult and competitive environment.

When they lose like they did last night, the Knicks suddenly embody all of New York’s collective fears. Your landlord will jack your rent. Your corner bar will close. Your Citibike dock will be empty. Your subway train will be delayed. You are not going to make it here. You are not going to make it anywhere.

Basketball’s just a game, but the Knicks collapsing feels serious. The Knicks become a pincushion, a voodoo doll exerting psychic pain on millions of New Yorkers. Between the bad weather and the bad loss, an angry undercurrent is going to run through New York for the next two days. Pedestrians’ tempers will run shorter, drivers’ horns will sound louder. The city will feel different than it did on Monday. The optimism, and the sun, are gone. Let’s hope that both the sun and the Knicks come back.

I’m currently on a plane to Las Vegas to attend the HIMSS healthcare conference. Healthcare and gambling are both defined by extraordinary amounts of wasteful spending and poor returns on investment. This conference’s agenda will be dominated with ideas and pitches on how we can deliver better healthcare for less money - AI, value based care, remote patient monitoring. The list goes on.

After the sessions, many of those same attendees are going to leave the conference center, hit the casino floor, and get hosed. It doesn’t matter whether it is slots, craps, roulette, or blackjack, casinos are designed to take money and they are quite good at it. Meanwhile, Vegas casinos are raising bet minimums, lowering odds via rule changes (Hello triple-zero roulette), and worsening service.

Sure, there are ways to hypothetically make money within a casino’s walls. You could play poker or count cards in Blackjack. Both require a large amount of skill, practice, and concentration (and for card-counting, subterfuge). These can be positive expected value but have immense variance. Even on a good day, they are very hard ways to make an easy living, and not how I want to spend valuable free time after a long conference day.

We can’t beat the house, but what if we could make the house bleed a little bit. Like Rocky, we can’t win against Vegas’s Apollo Creed, but we can make them go twelve rounds. How? Pai Gow Tiles.

Before I dive more into what Pai Gow Tiles is and why it enables this, I want to establish criteria for what getting value from gambling looks like. We’re very likely going to lose money at the table, so what matters is how much entertainment we get for that money. Think about it like going to a movie. If it costs $50 for two tickets, popcorn, and sodas for a ninety-minute movie, it is effectively $1.80 per minute of entertainment. Don’t do calculations here too literally. The amount of entertainment per minute is going to vary a lot based on the movie, and I’d rarely wish that a movie is longer so that I get more “value” for my money. The point is that it is normal to spend money to be entertained, and gambling should be viewed with the same lens.

So, what makes gambling in a Vegas casino entertaining? Personal opinion, but I’d say

1. How fun is the game itself?

2. How is the atmosphere and service?

3. Do you leave with good stories?

Our goal is to maximize those three while losing the least amount of money per hour. No table game comes close to Pai Gow Tiles.

Pai Gow Tiles is a Chinese gambling game allegedly dating from the Song dynasty. In Vegas, it can be found in a small number of casinos on the Strip. Instead of a deck of cards, it uses a “deck” of thirty-two tiles (effectively dominoes). I’ll skip an in-depth description of how it is played, (you can find a video here), but I definitely find it very fun. It is mentally engaging (lots of strategy to memorize, recall, and apply) and tactile (you roll dice and move the tiles). It avoids the robotic right answers of Blackjack or the mindless lack of meaningful choice in Craps. The best part, however, is the pace.

Pai Gow Tiles has, by far, the lowest amount of times an hour where you will win or lose money of any casino game (excluding poker). Half of all rounds lead to a tie, where no money is won or lost. Between each round, the “deck” of tiles needs to be hand-shuffled. Imagine if the dealer had to stop and re-shuffle after every hand of Blackjack. Shuffling tiles is much more involved than shuffling cards, and much more time-intensive. This means you can sit for a lot longer while actually risking a lot less. Your expected value per round is worse than Blackjack (although better than most other casino games), but there’s an order of magnitude less rounds per hour, so, odds are, you’ll end up losing less money.

Now, sitting around is great and all, but only if the atmosphere and service makes doing so enjoyable. Pai Gow Tiles is relatively unpopular in Vegas. Only a few casinos have it, and I’ve never seen more than one table. From talking to pit bosses, the main player base for Pai Gow Tiles in Vegas consists of Asian high-rollers, which is what justifies keeping around a unique, unpopular, and intensive game to run. The singular table, combined with targeting high-rollers, means that the tables are often in the high limit room of the casino. Bet minimums are not low (e.g $100/hand) but are far lower than a Blackjack table in the same room. This, combined with the slow pace, means you can risk a relatively small amount of money to be in the nicest area of the casino.

Vegas may be squeezing most folks, but they know where their bread is buttered, and still treat high rollers well. Just by playing in the high limit room, you’re generally in an ornate area getting the best service from the best dealers, pit bosses, and waitresses the casino has. Cocktail service is much better (both in terms of speed and quality). instead of a plastic cup of club soda or a shot of Jim Beam, you’re getting bottles of Perrier, crystal glasses of Japanese whiskey, cigars, and more. This is all very fun and does also potentially impact your expected value. Getting an $8 sparkling water or an $80 glass of whiskey for “free” meaningfully offsets your expected losses.

So, do you get good stories? I’d say so. I stumbled on Pai Gow Tiles during a holiday weekend in Atlantic City where it was the only table game with empty seats. From there, to Vegas high-limit rooms watching as the person on my right bet $10,000 a hand, to this blog post, it’s led to some memorable stories over these past eighteen months. If you’re gonna gamble, you may was well get your money’s worth, and Pai Gow Tiles is a great way to do so. Check it out the next time you’re in Vegas or Atlantic City.

As I’ve mentioned the past couple years, I went years without reading a book. I’d still read — Twitter, Reddit, blogs, newspapers, etc — but didn’t finish a book. That was a mistake. There’s something special about sitting down with genuinely long-form content, especially content that is much less reactionary than what we consume online.

In 2024, I read 41 books. I mostly chose these based off of recommendations (primarily from in-person conversations), and keep a running list of books that I may want to read next. The recommendations I get are (normally) good, and it’s fun to be able tie a book to how you first heard of it. Given I rely so much on other people’s picks, I thought it’d be helpful for me to share my own.

I mostly read non-fiction. These are books that were new to me in 2024, so plenty of them are years (or even decades) old. I’ve highlighted three books were lesser known to me (e.g no cultural phenomenons or TV/Movie adaptations) that I particularly liked. Beyond that, I’m going to avoid including authors, blurbs, or my own personal thoughts. That’s partially laziness, but partially because it’s fun to pick books just off titles.

My Three Picks

1. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

2. Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

3. All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work

The Rest

1. Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West

2. Borstal Boy

3. All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

4. The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers And The Death Of Their Las Vegas

5. The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

6. My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas

7. Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas (Travel Holiday Guides)

8. There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History

9. The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports

10. Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy

11. Rejection: Fiction

12. Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System-and Pocketed $40 Million

13. Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America

14. McMillions: The Absolutely True Story of How an Unlikely Pair of FBI Agents Brought Down the Most Supersized Fraud in Fast Food History

15. Red Plenty

16. Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever

17. Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games

18. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

19. Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida

20. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

21. Fuccboi: A Novel

22. Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore's Deadliest Gang Leader

23. Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever

24. Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

25. Down the Drain

26. Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

27. Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony

28. Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring

29. Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

30. We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption

31. The Counting House

32. Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story

33. The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

34. A Drinking Life: A Memoir

35. The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations

36. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

37. A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan

38. The Wrong Stuff

Read any of these? Have any more recommendations? Please send thoughts and new book recs my way!

New York is a magical place. Sometimes literally. When three tuxedoed men walked into a bar at 3 am, it didn’t feel like magic, but like the start of a corny joke. Billymark’s was not a place for tuxedos. It was, however, a great place for High Life, which was always cold, and, despite my buddy’s and my best attempts that night, seemingly endless.

One of the men rifled through his pockets and pulled out a deck of cards. He started shuffling, before launching into twenty minutes of rapid fire card tricks and stage banter. They were magicians. Their showtime for Speakeasy Magick, an accompaniment to the famous Sleep No More, had finished for the night, and Billymark’s was close to the venue. These people clearly loved what they did, and never wanted to stop their act.

I was never able to get tickets to Sleep No More, or Speakeasy Magick, but I got a show that night. An out-of-the-blue show driven by passion, totally devoid of any financial incentives. That was Billymark’s in a nutshell. A bar fueled by passion. A bar owned by the two namesake brothers, who had bought up lots of primo Manhattan real estate in the 70s and 80s, which meant they didn’t need to be running a bar.

And still, they did. They alternated manning the bar, opening it up faithfully at 8am, every day of the week, for decades. Mark’s a (to me, lovable) asshole, Billy is way nicer. Neither of them needed to deal with the mix of drunks, tourists, MSG attendees, magicians, and partiers that they had on a daily basis, but they did.

Until this year. Billymark’s closed. Thankfully, the close was not due to the ever-common rent hikes, but to the brothers’ retirement. It may even come back. The for-rent sign comes and goes, and articles published months before closing give a little bit of hope.

For now, it’s gone. Cynically, it’s likely to stay gone. Even if it comes back, it can’t be the same. You can’t hand off the brother dynamic. You can’t hand off fifty years of manning the bar. You just wait, bemoaning the deaths of places you care about which all replaced the places that other people cared about. It’s the cycle of life. There were few better bars to think about your other favorite bars closing, your day going sideways, or the Knicks losing. Let’s hope, just like those magicians, Billymark’s has a few more tricks left up its sleeve.

(Photo from Lloyd Wise)