Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedRecommends Insomniac City.
1 Mar 2026 Lenny's Podcast The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)
“The second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jenny Wen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 1 Mar 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? The first one is The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which is an incredibly aggressive recommendation, given that it's like 1100 pages. But I think, in this era, when our attention spans are so short, I think this is actually worth reading end to end, because I think there are very few collections or memoirs where it spans through someone's entire life, and you sort of see how somebody changes throughout those decades. And it's also somebody who's really controversial too. And it's nice to read a really nuanced view of somebody, Robert Moses. And I think we just lose out on some of this long arc thinking, because we're thinking so much about right now. So it's just an important reminder that careers are long, and is also really good for understanding how somebody just gets things done really well. So Power Broker. The second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes , who was the partner of the scientist, Oliver Sacks, around the time that Oliver Sacks died. And it's just this really beautiful, ethereal memoir of Oliver Sacks' last days, and their sort of love story. I think this has very little to do with the stuff on your podcast, Lenny, but it's just a book that I really love, and just makes you think about mortality, but also love and life and stuff like that. So that's one of my favorite books. My goal here is, we're trying to create Renaissance humans, so all of this other stuff is excellent.…
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