A collection of 26 concrete study projects for 2026, organized around output-driven learning. Based on Meaghan Green’s framework: every project ends with a deliverable—not just a reading list.
1. Nietzsche in Order
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Prideaux — Eu sou dinamite! · Nietzsche — O nascimento da tragédia → Assim Falava Zaratustra → Ecce Homo · Marton — Nietzsche, filósofo da suspeita
Output: Essay: “What did Nietzsche actually mean by the death of God — and was he right?” Reading him chronologically with a biographer as guide changes everything. Most people only know the quotes.
2. The Democracy Lab
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Arendt — Origens do totalitarismo · Eco — O fascismo eterno · Mounk — O povo contra a democracia + O grande experimento · Orwell — Fascismo e Democracia
Output: A structured debate with 2–3 friends where you play devil’s advocate for an uncomfortable position. Write the opening argument beforehand (800 words). The preparation is the learning.
3. Borges as Method
Approach: Make something real
Books: El Aleph · Libro de sueños · Nove ensaios dantescos · Olmos — Por que ler Borges
Output: Write one short story (500–800 words) in Borges’ style — an invented encyclopedia entry, a fake book review, or a labyrinthine logic puzzle. Borges is impossible to understand without trying to imitate him.
4. How Civilizations Die
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Diamond — Colapso · Ferguson — Doom · Gibbon — Declínio e queda do Império Romano (abridged) · Tooze — Crashed
Output: Essay: “Which of Diamond’s five collapse factors is most visible in Brazil today?” Forces you to apply a framework against real current evidence, not just history.
5. Lewis vs. the Modern World
Approach: Teach what you’ve learned
Books: Lewis — A abolição do homem · Lewis — Cartas de um diabo a seu aprendiz · Lewis — Surpreendido pela alegria · Lewis — Os quatro amores
Output: A reading guide for one person you know who would benefit from Lewis but has never read him. Which book first, why, what to watch for. Teaching one person is more concrete than writing for nobody.
6. The Complexity Cluster
Approach: Make something real
Books: Gleick — Chaos · Meadows — Thinking in Systems · Waldrop — Complexity · Barabási — Linked
Output: Map a real system you know (your city’s traffic, a company’s org chart, Brazilian politics) using the vocabulary from these books — feedback loops, attractors, hubs, emergent behavior. Diagram + 500-word annotation. Forces you to think, not just read.
7. Brazil Before Brazil
Approach: Teach what you’ve learned
Books: Gomes — 1822 · Gomes — 1889 · Gomes — Escravidão Vol. 1 · Lopes — 1499: O Brasil antes de Cabral · Bueno — Brasil, uma história
Output: A 30-minute talk you give to your family or a group of friends — “Five things about Brazilian history that most Brazilians don’t know.” Laurentino Gomes writes for exactly this kind of storytelling.
Field research: For each period covered, identify a Brazilian museum where you can see that history in person — indigenous pre-1500, colonial, slavery, imperial, and republic. Map them geographically and note what each holds that the books don’t capture. Candidates to investigate: Museu Nacional (Rio), Museu Afro Brasil (São Paulo), Museu Histórico Nacional (Rio), Museu do Ipiranga (São Paulo), Museu da Inconfidência (Ouro Preto), Museu do Índio (Rio). Document which ones are worth a visit and why.
8. Luc Ferry Cover to Cover
Approach: Teach what you’ve learned
Books: Ferry — Aprender a viver → A mais bela história da filosofia → A sabedoria dos mitos gregos → A vida feliz
Output: Read him as a course, not individual books. Output: a one-page “Ferry map” — his central argument across all four books in your own words. Then decide publicly if you agree with his secular spirituality thesis.
9. The Umberto Eco Seminar
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Eco — O nome da rosa (novel) · Eco — Confissões de um jovem romancista · Eco — Construir o inimigo · Eco — O fascismo eterno
Output: Essay: “What is the difference between a conspiracy theory and a legitimate pattern? Use Eco’s framework.” He spent his life on exactly this question — the line between semiosis and paranoia.
10. The Existentialist Turn
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Camus — O mito de Sísifo + O homem revoltado · Bakewell — No café existencialista · Frankl — Man’s Search for Meaning
Output: Essay: “Is absurdism more honest than stoicism?” You have both libraries — make them argue. Camus vs. Marcus Aurelius is one of the most productive intellectual fights you can stage.
11. Simone Weil Against Everyone
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Weil — La Pesanteur et la Grâce · Weil — L’Iliade ou le poème de la force · Weil — Sur la science
Output: Essay: “Was Simone Weil right that attention is the rarest form of love?” Her essay on the Iliad alone will change how you read Homer.
12. What Makes Us Human
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Sapolsky — Behave · Haidt — The Righteous Mind · Christakis — Blueprint · Sapolsky — Determined
Output: Essay: “If free will doesn’t exist (Sapolsky), does Haidt’s moral psychology still matter?” These two authors have an unspoken argument in your library. Make it explicit.
13. Manguel’s Library as Method
Approach: Make something real
Books: Manguel — A biblioteca à noite · Manguel — Don Quijote y sus fantasmas · Manguel — Bibliotecas
Output: Catalog your own Kindle library with intention — not a spreadsheet, but a personal taxonomy: which books are there for status, which for comfort, which you’ll never read, which changed you. Write a 600-word reflection on what your library says about who you want to be.
14. Ancient Rome, Start to Finish
Approach: Teach what you’ve learned
Books: Holland — Rubicon · Holland — Domínio · Cazzullo — Roma · Gibbon — Declínio e queda (abridged)
Output: A structured conversation or podcast episode (even just recorded for yourself) walking through Rome’s full arc: Republic → Empire → Christianity → Collapse. The discipline of speaking forces cleaner thinking than writing.
15. What Turing Actually Said
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Petzold — The Annotated Turing · Ananthaswamy — Why Machines Learn · Russell — Human Compatible · Gleiser — O ponto cego
Output: Essay: “Should passing the Turing Test matter?” Most technologists invoke Turing without reading him. Petzold walks through the original paper line by line — what Turing actually claimed is far stranger and more modest than the myth. Use Gleiser’s epistemological limits as a counterweight to Russell’s optimism.
16. What Would Descartes Build?
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Descartes — Discurso do Método · Ousterhout — A Philosophy of Software Design · Meadows — Thinking in Systems · Petzold — The Annotated Turing
Output: Essay: “Which philosophical method is secretly running modern software engineering?” Descartes’ radical doubt maps surprisingly well onto testing and formal verification. Ousterhout is doing philosophy without admitting it. Make that argument explicitly.
17. Map Your Own Surveillance
Approach: Make something real
Books: Snowden — Eterna vigilância · Zetter — Countdown to Zero Day · Noble — Algoritmos da Opressão · AWS — Security Pillar
Output: A personal audit — map every system you use daily (phone, bank, apps, email) and document: what data is collected, who holds it, under what legal framework, and what you could actually do to reduce exposure. Snowden and Zetter give the threat model; Noble shows who pays the price when it fails; AWS gives the technical vocabulary. The deliverable is a real map of your own digital life, not an abstract essay.
18. The Human After Technology
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Han — Infocracia + Não coisas · Suleyman — A próxima onda · Morozov — Big Tech · Russell — Human Compatible
Output: Essay: “Is Han right that digitalization is destroying the conditions for political life?” Han is the sharpest critic; Suleyman is the optimist insider; Russell is the worried engineer. Put them in the same room and force a verdict.
19. Engineering Is Applied Philosophy
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Descartes — Discurso do Método · Ousterhout — A Philosophy of Software Design · Meadows — Thinking in Systems · Petzold — The Annotated Turing
Output: Essay: “Which philosopher would make the best software architect?” Descartes’ systematic doubt is basically test-driven development. Meadows’ feedback loops are distributed systems. Ousterhout is doing philosophy without admitting it. Make the argument explicitly — engineers don’t realize how much ancient thinking runs under their work.
20. The Debugging Guide for Human Reasoning
Approach: Teach what you’ve learned
Books: Bergstrom & West — Calling Bullshit · Pinker — Rationality · Parrish — Clear Thinking · Duke — Thinking in Bets
Output: Write a field guide — “10 cognitive bugs that engineers are especially prone to.” Engineers trust systems and models, which creates specific failure modes: mistaking precision for accuracy, optimizing the measurable over the important, treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This is genuinely useful for a technical audience and publishable.
21. What Intellectual Tradition Produced Software?
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Petzold — The Annotated Turing · Gleick — Chaos · Waldrop — Complexity · Wootton — The Invention of Science
Output: Essay: “Software didn’t come from mathematics — it came from the same tradition that produced the scientific revolution.” Wootton shows what changed in 1543–1687; Gleick and Waldrop show how those ideas mutated into computation. Most engineers think their field descended from pure math. The actual intellectual genealogy is stranger and more humanistic.
22. The Problems Technology Cannot Solve
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Russell — Human Compatible · Suleyman — A próxima onda · Morozov — Big Tech · Haidt — The Righteous Mind
Output: Essay: “Why do engineers keep applying technical solutions to problems that are fundamentally political?” Russell worries about alignment; Morozov argues tech solutionism is itself the problem; Haidt explains why humans disagree in ways no algorithm resolves. Take a real example — content moderation, misinformation, inequality — and show where the technical framing breaks down.
23. Feynman as Role Model
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Gleick — Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman · Gleiser — A ilha do conhecimento · Hossenfelder — A Ciência tem todas as respostas? · Parrish — The Great Mental Models Vol. 1
Output: Essay: “What made Feynman’s thinking different — and can it be learned?” Feynman’s real skill wasn’t physics, it was epistemic hygiene — knowing exactly what he knew and didn’t know. Hossenfelder and Gleiser both argue modern science has lost this. Parrish operationalizes it. For a technologist, this is really a question about how to think under uncertainty.
24. Privacy as Political Philosophy
Approach: Answer a burning question
Books: Arendt — A condição humana · Thoreau — Walden · Snowden — Eterna vigilância · Bastiat — A lei
Output: Essay: “Privacy isn’t a technical problem — it’s a political one. What political theory do we need to defend it?” Arendt’s distinction between public and private life is the most rigorous foundation for privacy rights ever written, and almost no one in tech has read it. Thoreau adds the civil disobedience angle; Snowden is the modern case study; Bastiat asks what the law is actually for.
25. The Architecture of Consent
Approach: Make something real
Books: Morozov — Big Tech · Han — Não coisas · Kleppmann — Designing Data-Intensive Applications · AWS — Security Pillar
Output: Audit one app or service you use daily — map exactly what data it collects, where it flows, what the consent mechanism actually says vs. what it does, and what a genuinely privacy-respecting alternative would look like technically. Kleppmann and AWS give you the engineering vocabulary; Morozov and Han give you the critical framework. The deliverable is a concrete technical + ethical assessment, not just an opinion.
26. Brazil’s Privacy Problem
Approach: Make something real
Books: Snowden — Eterna vigilância · Noble — Algoritmos da Opressão · Acemoglu — O corredor estreito · Constituição Federal do Brasil
Output: A practical guide: “What does the LGPD actually protect — and what does it leave exposed?” Brazil has one of the world’s newer comprehensive privacy laws (LGPD, 2020), modeled on GDPR but with weaker enforcement. Map the gap between what the law promises and what Snowden, Noble, and the institutional analysis of Acemoglu suggest about whether weak states can actually enforce privacy rights. Publishable and genuinely useful.
Related Seeds
- Personal Curriculum — The framework: output-driven learning
- Education — Learning and transformation
- Philosophy — Philosophical inquiry across traditions