Nan Ransohoff: Finding Things Out, Double Life, Matriarch, Inputs, Evil, the Beatles
Welcome to a new issue of Words That Matter! Each week, we invite a guest curator to share the reading that matters most to them.
Nan Ransohoff (@nanransohoff) leads Stripe Climate and founded Frontier, a $1B+ advance market commitment for permanent carbon removal. More broadly, her work focuses on incentive design to help solve important societal problems. Previously she built products at Uber, Nuro and Opower. She was named to the Bloomberg 50 in 2022 and the TIME100 Climate list in 2025.
Nan writes about topics like market shaping for public goods, moral imagination, and San Francisco culture on her website and Substack.
Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Nan!
Nan’s Picks
The pleasure of finding things out (essay collection)
Richard Feynman
This is a collection of Feynman essays and interviews that are ostensibly about science, but really they’re about much of life – embracing uncertainty, finding the fun and mischief in things, dialing up wonder, exploring big ideas with both intellectual honesty and also a lightness. I forget how I stumbled across these essays originally, but for the past few years I’ve returned to them many times when I’m in need of a mindset ‘tune-up.’ They’ve become sort of medicinal for me – even ~15 minutes with one of them can reliably infuse my brain with a lot more color / texture / energy. (My favorites are: The pleasure of finding things out, There’s plenty of room at the bottom, and What is and what should be the role of scientific culture? – but hop around at your leisure!)
The lives they loved – Regine Weiss Ransohoff (essay)
Martha Ransohoff Adler
I’ll start with the obligatory admission that I am obviously biased here: this is a short piece written by my aunt about my grandmother when she died. Even so! I am pretty sure I’d still love this piece even if I didn’t know Regine. It’s a masterclass in capturing the essence of a person. You can feel how fierce, principled, irreverent, brilliant and witty she was, even in just a few short paragraphs. I think about this piece a lot. It makes me wonder what my (hypothetical) daughter would write about me. It forces an almost semi-regular check-in with myself to see if I’m living in a way that feels directionally aligned with who I hope and aspire to be.
The marriage question: George Eliot’s double life (book)
Clare Carlisle
This book is responsible for my obsession with George Eliot (yes, yes, I too read Middlemarch and loved it, but this took the love to a new level). Among the many reasons to love Eliot is that she made some insanely bold/risky/controversial life choices by today’s standards, let alone for a woman who was born in 1819. And, importantly, things pretty much worked out for her in spite of those choices! This was a woman who was experimenting with and looking closely at relationships through both her own life and the characters she wrote (her ‘double life’ per Carlisle). Furthermore, this book delightfully defies genres – it’s part biography, part philosophical inquiry, part literary criticism. I could go on. But if I had to summarize the net effect of this book on me, it was a massive infusion of courage to not ‘snap-to-grid’ by default for big life choices.
Ted Gioia on Conversations with Tyler (podcast)
The part of the conversation that really stuck with me was the concept of ‘managing your inputs.’ In life we’re evaluated on our output, but that’s downstream of input. “ I know for a fact, I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.” If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output. The ‘zealous management’ of our inputs seems to be among the more important meta-muscles one can build (and one I am still very much working on).
Art is for seeing evil (essay)
A provocative take on the value of art and what it is for, written by the one and only Agnes Callard.
Democracy in America (book)
Alexis de Tocqueville
During undergrad I became very interested in religion as one of the ways humans solve collective action problems – getting large groups of strangers to act in pro-social ways that lead to societal optimal outcomes (I ended up writing my senior thesis on a variant of this idea). Democracy in America was very foundational for me during this period. In de Tocqueville’s view, religion creates voluntary constraints that prevent moral anarchy and political tyranny. “The greatest advantage religions bring is to inspire quite contrary instincts...[to] impose upon each man certain obligations toward the human race or [to] encourage a shared endeavor.” With religiosity precipitously declining in much of the world, I think this is worth a read (or re-read) to understand what role religion played and what gaps we must fill.
John & Paul: A love story in songs (book)
Ian Leslie
I’ll start by saying I’m not a particularly enthusiastic Beatles fan, and still I absolutely tore through this book. To me, this is ultimately a book about a type of relationship that defies all of the ‘normal’ categories. It’s not ‘just’ a friendship, it’s not ‘just’ a creative partnership. In some ways it resembles a marriage, but it’s not quite that either. There’s an intimacy that stems from their shared creative and intellectual endeavor. It’s deeply romantic but not sexual. This book, among other things, made me think about all of the wonderfully rich variants of relationships that exist, and how impoverished our categories for describing them are by comparison. Also, the final two pages brought me to tears (the good kind). I’ve reread them ~a dozen times. (Relatedly: I read this as part of a made-up cluster of books on creative collaborations, including The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty, Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf, and Collaborative Circles by Michael Farrell. Highly recommend!)
Spotlight on Nan’s Work
A few pieces of note from Nan’s work:
More writing can be found on her website here. You can subscribe to her Substack here and Twitter here.
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