I'm Hosting a Few Events This Month!
Come learn about books and computers!
I've been very bullish on the concept of building ".nyc" domains to help New Yorkers achieve their goals lately.
This city has given me so much, specifically through event calendars like Nonsense NYC. I've felt very motivated as of late to get off my screen and engage with real New Yorkers.
As such, I'm happy to announce two events that I'm working on for later this month (August 2026)!
Book Club Speed Dating
Not romantic, but perhaps life changing! Finding books and finding people are integral skills to being an adult that give you both agency and communion. The right book at the right time can completely change how you view the world and how you act in it.
This Book Club Speed Dating event is the inaugural debut of Commonplace.NYC, an organization that my friend Andrew and I are running that has the goal of making New Yorkers better readers.
To achieve this, our goal is ironically to de-center books from the reading experience and re-center the reader.
Let's look at the old and tired concept of the book club. Using book clubs as an example of re-centering the readers, the idea isn't that you just get together to do boring chapter discussions over the book where everyone is expected to read at the same pace or to consider why the curtains are red. The book club as a medium can make the book engaging by going to read together at historical places or museums, watching movies or going to bars, or making shared art together and utilizing other things that are available to us in a city like New York.
Another, more pithy way of thinking about it is that, instead of the book club existing because of the book, the book becomes just another member of the book club. The orbit moves from being around the book to being around each other.
Following a short lecture on how to establish better reader mindsets, we will break into a speed dating format where everyone will be able to talk to each other about what book clubs they'd be willing to organize and be a part of. Ideally, everyone can leave with more than one book club, and express diverse interests every individual has with different books ... and make some friends too!!
You can see some examples of book clubs that I've decided to host in Sept/Oct following this thesis below.
If you'd like to be part of the first trial of this experience and help us refine it into something interesting, sign up for the Luma in this link.
AI Lunch and Learn
In the Mamdani era New Yorkers find ourselves in at the moment, there is a current exuberance to be able to solve real community problems with the tools that we have available to us.
Having worked in the field of software engineering and, more recently, language models for many years now, I feel enabled to help New Yorkers solve local problems using artificial intelligence tools like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.
I have joined my friends Maria, Carson, and Brinley at 3PC Labs, where we are tasked with the idea of helping New Yorkers skill up in artificial intelligence.
if you want to be able to understand AI at a level that's practical and useful in our daily lives (at the level of understanding MTA train times, how to find different pizza restaurants, or dealing with roommate drama in New York City, etc.), you should come down to this lunch and learn at Chelsea Market.
Hope to see you IRL!
Best,
Bram
