Past, Present, and Future
April 10, 2025 • #A useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government
Topic / books
111 posts✦
September 16, 2024 • #
My thoughts on the books that constitute Silicon Valley’s “canon” of essential, influential works.
⎈
September 16, 2024 • #
Stewart Brand on tradition.
From How Buildings Learn.
⎈
May 22, 2024 • #
My latest post is a deep dive on Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. If you can’t tell from the length, this book is full of gold, and one of my favorites in a long time:
⎈
March 23, 2024 • #
Dune read by Frank Herbert, vinyl records on Caedmon Records 1977 - 1982. Art by John Schoenherr & Frank Kelly Freas (‘The Banquet Scene’)
Incredible. Would love a hardcover set with these images.
⎈
March 3, 2024 • #
The Zones of thought from Vernor Vinge’s eponymous science fiction series.
⎈
February 22, 2024 • #
Great book, incredible illustrations.
⎈
February 21, 2024 • #
Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer.
My favorite science fiction novel.
⎈
February 19, 2024 • #
**Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer. **
My favorite science fiction novel.
⎈
February 10, 2024 • #
The film adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation took some liberties in the narrative. But Alex Garland’s vision on the world, the twisted melange of organisms, the shroom-trip in the Southern Reach — all spot on.
⎈
February 5, 2024 • #
A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.
—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)
(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)
The organism is a key to decoding its environment.
⎈
January 26, 2024 • #
The human use of human beings - Cybernetics and Society.
Man ↔ machine symbiosis.
⎈
January 23, 2024 • #
This book is dense and fascinating. Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by how companies, organizations, or groups in general operate — the driving psychologies behind different types of orgs.
⎈
Eliot Peper on Foundry
October 24, 2023 • #Eliot Peper's behind-the-scenes look at writing a novel.
✦
Media Consumption, April 2023
May 1, 2023 • #Media consumed in April 2023.
✦
Books of 2022
January 4, 2023 • #The complete list of reads from 2022.
✦
A List of Books from Marc Andreessen
October 4, 2022 • #A short update with a great reading list.
✦
Portals Into Earth
September 21, 2022 • #From John McPhee's 'Annals of the Former World'.
✦
Notes on the Design of Everyday Things
August 25, 2022 • #Notes on Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things.
✦
David McCullough Dies at 89
August 16, 2022 • #The death of legendary historian.
✦
The Kalevala and the Underworld
August 5, 2022 • #An eerie similarity between an ancient Finnish myth and a deep geological nuclear repository.
✦
Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State
September 17, 2021 • #Readwise launches a reading app, Scott Alexander reviews Martin Gurri, and Jonah Goldberg on the helicopter state.
✦
Constitution of Knowledge
June 22, 2021 • #An interview with Jonathan Rauch on his new book.
✦
On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities
April 6, 2021 • #Diving deep on the ideas of James Scott
✦
Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More
March 20, 2021 • #An interview with @austen, @lennysan on content, Earth from oblique, books of @wethefifth, and Microsoft's Power Fx.
✦
The Great Books Program
January 12, 2021 • #Tommy Collison's 'great books' reading program.
✦
Books of 2020
January 7, 2021 • #An overview of my 2020 reads.
✦
A Reverse Dunkirk
November 6, 2020 • #What if the Germans had used a different strategy in 1940?
✦
Notes on Inspired
October 16, 2020 • #Notes from Marty Cagan's Inspired.
✦
What if Government Paid Better?
October 14, 2020 • #Government vs. free markets and attracting the ambitious class.
✦
Second and Third-Order Effects
October 6, 2020 • #The cascading impacts of invention: the shipping container.
✦
The Antilibrary
September 17, 2020 • #Building my personal antilibrary.
✦
Readwise and Roam Research
September 8, 2020 • #An overview of Readwise's new integration with Roam Research, to bring your Kindle highlights into your knowledge graph.
✦
Readwise, Books, and Spaced Repetition
August 7, 2020 • #A review of Readwise and how it'll help you get more out of the books you read.
✦
On Legibility
July 31, 2020 • #Riffs on James Scott's 'Seeing Like a State' and Venkatesh Rao's commentary on the book.
✦
Library Notes
July 20, 2020 • #Publishing book summaries and notes in the Library.
✦
Literature Notes for the Library
July 17, 2020 • #On writing literature notes for books and coming up with a method for publishing them.
✦
Book Light
July 10, 2020 • #A new amber-color book light for nighttime reading.
✦
Audiobooks and Engagement
June 16, 2020 • #Is listening to audiobooks less useful and engaging than reading text?
✦
SSC Reviews the Origin of Consciousness
June 4, 2020 • #Scott Alexander's review of the Origin of Consciousness.
✦
Current Reads
April 29, 2020 • #Adding 'current reads' to my library section.
✦
Library JSON
April 16, 2020 • #A proposal to build an open format for book data using json.
✦
Ken Burns Presents: The Gene
April 8, 2020 • #✦
Hardy Boys and Microkids
March 17, 2020 • #A review of Tracy Kidder's 1981 book, 'The Soul of a New Machine'.
✦
Library 2.0
March 6, 2020 • #Upgrading my library database to use Airtable.
✦
A Text Renaissance
February 28, 2020 • #✦
Readwise and Instapaper
February 27, 2020 • #Using Readwise's Instapaper integration for highlights on the web.
✦
Back to the Future
February 20, 2020 • #Peter Thiel reviews Ross Douthat's new book.
✦
Kindle Features and Areas for Improvement
February 12, 2020 • #Thoughts on the Kindle devices, ecosystem, and user experience, with a number of proposed improvements.
✦
Books and Microdata
January 27, 2020 • #Adding schema.org microdata to my library.
✦
Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
January 18, 2020 • #Venkatesh Rao's theory of internet beef, the impacts of company culture, and Turchin's Secular Cycles.
✦
William Gibson on Agency
January 14, 2020 • #William Gibson discusses his latest work and writing speculative fiction in the modern era.
✦
Reading Metrics
January 9, 2020 • #Metrics about my reading habits in 2019.
✦
Weekend Reading: Bullets in Games, Lessons of History, and BrickLink
January 5, 2020 • #Bullet physics in games, notes from The Lessons of History, and BrickLink's Lego database.
✦
Goal Summary: Books of 2019
December 30, 2019 • #Books of 2019.
✦
Blood is Thicker Than Water
December 26, 2019 • #Steve Stewart-Williams on kin selection and altruism.
✦
The Infinity Machine
December 22, 2019 • #A book review and a personal story: immunotherapy and The Elegant Defense.
✦
The Black Swan, Reviewed by Scott Alexander
December 12, 2019 • #Slate Star Codex looks at the probability of a reviewer's book review success.
✦
Kindle for Mac
December 8, 2019 • #The reading experience of e-books on a full desktop with Kindle for Mac.
✦
Weekend Reading: The Worst Year to Be Alive, Chinese Sci-Fi, and Slack Networks
December 7, 2019 • #Why the 6th century was so miserable, the work of Ken Liu in spreading Chinese Sci-Fi, and Stewart Butterfield on Slack's shared channels.
✦
A Third Force
December 2, 2019 • #A review of Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American'.
✦
Weaving Books Into the Web
November 15, 2019 • #The Internet Archive is working on linking to scanned books for Wikipedia book citations.
✦
Rory Sutherland on Alchemy
November 12, 2019 • #✦
Weekend Reading: Baseball Graphics, the Mind Illuminated, and the Crucial Century
October 19, 2019 • #Comparing baseball broadcast graphics, a review of The Mind Illuminated, and thinking about the most likely sites for the Industrial Revolution.
✦
bookish.tech
October 18, 2019 • #✦
Book Haul, October
October 14, 2019 • #The latest pickups from Chamblin's in Jacksonville.
✦
The All Things Tech History List
October 8, 2019 • #A great list of books, podcasts, movies, and more on the history of tech and Silicon Valley.
✦
Stripe Press
August 26, 2019 • #Stripe is publishing their own editions of classic books about human progress.
✦
Writing Shape Up
August 25, 2019 • #✦
Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
August 17, 2019 • #Real-time terrain mesh with MARTINI, designing Notion using Figma, and @patrickc's bookshelf.
✦
Managerial Leverage
August 5, 2019 • #A review of Andy Grove's 'High Output Management', the most useful business book.
✦
Shape Up
July 11, 2019 • #The new ebook from the Basecamp team on product development.
✦
Weekend Reading: Satellites, Antilibraries, and Libra
June 29, 2019 • #Visualizing Earth's satellites, the value of an antilibrary, and Facebook's Libra.
✦
The Reading Diet
June 26, 2019 • #A few notes on my recent reading habits, and on buying over renting books.
✦
Andy Grove on Meetings
June 21, 2019 • #Andy Grove's timeless thoughts on the meeting as a medium for managerial work.
✦
Reaching the Early Majority
June 18, 2019 • #An overview of Geoffrey Moore's tech industry standard, Crossing the Chasm.
✦
Rethinking the American High School
April 30, 2019 • #A study from Harvard looks at the effectiveness and structures of the highest-performing American high schools.
✦
Process Not Products
April 14, 2019 • #On 'Loonshots' and how phase transitions apply to companies.
✦
Linguistic Relativity
April 7, 2019 • #A review of John McWhorter's 'The Language Hoax'.
✦
A Neural Chernobyl
March 11, 2019 • #A review of Bruce Sterling's 1992 collection of short stories, 'Globalhead'.
✦
The Origin and Transmutation of Species
February 10, 2019 • #Reviewing David Quammen's 'The Tangled Tree', rethinking new discoveries in evolutionary biology.
✦
Spirituality Without Religion
January 31, 2019 • #A quick review of Sam Harris's 'Waking Up'.
✦
A Vast Wilderness
January 27, 2019 • #“The vast wilderness of Alaska in ‘Coming Into the Country’.”
✦
Self Reliance and Introspection
January 16, 2019 • #A quick review of 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius.
✦
Books of 2018, Part 2
December 30, 2018 • #Part 2 of my annual reading wrap up.
✦
Books of 2018, Part 1
December 28, 2018 • #Part 1 of my annual reading wrap up.
✦
A Globe of Connections
December 19, 2018 • #Looking back on Parag Khanna's 'Connectography'.
✦
Kindle Highlights
December 14, 2018 • #Creating a library of Kindle excerpts.
✦
Progress Report: The Federalist Papers
December 4, 2018 • #“Thoughts on the Federalist through essay
✦
Quanta, Relativity, and the Nature of Reality
December 2, 2018 • #A review of Carlo Rovelli's 'Reality is Not What it Seems'.
✦
An In Depth History of Maps
November 28, 2018 • #On Lloyd A. Brown's 'A Story of Maps'
✦
The Library
November 26, 2018 • #Creating a library section for book reviews.
✦
Nonfiction Reading Patterns
November 18, 2018 • #“How my nonfiction interests have changed in recent years.”
✦
Additions to the Library
November 11, 2018 • #“The latest haul from Chamblin Bookmine in Jacksonville.”
✦
The Library Database
October 29, 2018 • #Turning my reading log into a database.
✦
2018 Reading List
October 16, 2018 • #“Books I’ve read and have on my list for 2018.”
✦
Books of 2017
December 28, 2017 • #Looking back at my favorite reads from 2017.
✦
Spacers and Earthmen
September 18, 2017 • #Asimov's Caves of Steel and the beginnings of the Robot trilogy.
✦
Kindle
April 4, 2017 • #✦
Bits & Genes
March 14, 2017 • #✦
Form Defining Function
February 16, 2017 • #✦
Books of 2016
January 18, 2017 • #A summary of favorite books I read in 2016.
✦
The Box That Built the Modern World
November 29, 2016 • #Great piece about the modularization of shipping and how it powered global trade.
✦
Annals of the Former World
March 15, 2016 • #A review of John McPhee's book and resparking an interest in geology.
✦
The Craft of Baseball
July 17, 2015 • #I just finished reading George Will's 'Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball', his 1989 book that dives deep on the strategy of the game. He sits down with 4 separate professional baseball men to analyze the sport and its component parts: managing with Tony La Russa, hitting with Tony Gwynn, fielding with Cal Ripken, Jr., and pitching with Orel Hershiser.
✦
The Three Laws of Robotics
March 7, 2014 • #A read of Isaac Asimov's short story collection, I, Robot.
✦
The Year in Books
December 21, 2013 • #Reviewing my favorites of 2013.
✦
Upwhen and Downwhen
October 30, 2013 • #Looking back at Asimov's time travel story, The End of Eternity.
✦
Spycraft
July 9, 2012 • #A review of 'Spycraft', a book about the OTS.
✦
Counterinsurgency, a brief history
June 19, 2012 • #Thoughts on counterinsurgency doctrine.
✦
Books of 2011
December 27, 2011 • #Books read in 2011.
✦