James Somers is a writer and programmer based in New York, NY. Contact me at
On this page I have collected:
The articles with asterisks (*) have gotten the most attention. I've highlighted a few of my favorites.
This is a list of the books I've read since my first day at college, arranged basically in the order I read them. I have the list both to jog my memory and because I've read a lot of stuff I've loved, and want other people to find it.
Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world's work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes' teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday.
I'd always wondered what it meant for genes to be "expressed" and when exactly this would happen, how long it would go on, how often it would be repeated. This book gave me a mental model of the cell that explains gene expression in a simple way: our transcription machinery, like all proteins in the cell, are bouncing around at random, very quickly, encountering other molecules to bind with (or not); when they encounter DNA, they transcribe ("express") it. Gene expression is modulated—genes are "turned off" or on—when the DNA encoding that gene is literally hidden from the transcription machinery, by being packed into the crevasses of tight chromatin bundles.