Topic
books
- Surface, an Obsidian plugin for Readwise
I read a lot, and most of what I read flows through Readwise. If you haven't used it. Readwise (and its companion app Reader) captures highlights from your Kindle, articles, RSS, and even YouTube transcripts. Everythi…
- 2010: Odyssey Two
Michael Whelan's inspiring cover art for Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two.
- Past, Present, and Future
Here's a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin's American Covenant: It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the futur…
- The Tech Canon
My thoughts on the books that constitute Silicon Valley’s “canon” of essential, influential works.
- Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand on tradition. From How Buildings Learn.
- Book Notes How Buildings Learn
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:
- Dune
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.
- Zones Of Thought
The Zones of thought from Vernor Vinge’s eponymous science fiction series.
- Tools
Great book, incredible illustrations.
- Japanese Cover For Gibsons Neuromancer
Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer. My favorite science fiction novel.
- Japanese Cover For Gibsons Neuromancer
Japanese cover for Gibson’s Neuromancer. My favorite science fiction novel.
- Annihilation
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.
- David Deutsch
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…
- Cybernetics
The human use of human beings - Cybernetics and Society. Man ↔ machine symbiosis.
- Images Of Organization
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
I love what Eliot Peper does with Substack as a sort of behind-the-scenes look at his writing process. I wish more authors and content creators spent the time to show their workflow. It's incredibly insightful to see…
- Media Consumption, April 2023
Reading Learning to Build, Bob Moesta ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 0-100% The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich ░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 64-100% The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan ░░░▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 16-31% Dominion…
- Books of 2022
This year I got to several books that have been on my list for years, excited to finally dig into them. Here's the full list, with my favorites ⭐️ starred: {% include book-snippet.html book-id="storrs-hall-where-is-my…
- A List of Books from Marc Andreessen
In this quick update on where he's been spending his time, investor Marc Andreessen (a famously deeply-read guy) includes a great reading list of books to check out. Some I've read, but most not, and some I've never h…
- Portals Into Earth
From John McPhee's Annals of the Former World: Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional…
- Notes on the Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is essential reading for anyone that creates products. I've been doing a re-read of the most recent edition myself. I also ran across this excellent set of notes on the book…
- David McCullough Dies at 89
Historian David McCullough died last week at age 89. If you've never read his work, it's some of the best, most readable and engaging history you can find. I've read a few of his books over the years, like The Great B…
- The Kalevala and the Underworld
I just finished Robert Macfarlane's Underland, a book about all things "underworld" — catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with histori…
- Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State
📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the "read-later" app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), b…
- Constitution of Knowledge
Jonathan Rauch's latest book The Constitution of Knowledge just dropped, which sounds sort of like a sequel, or at least a redux of his classic Kindly Inquisitors. Brookings held a panel on his book's release with his…
- On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities
This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020. In our last issue, we'd weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia,…
- Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More
👨🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you on…
- The Great Books Program
As I was thinking about some reading/study goals for 2021, I wanted to commit myself to prioritizing more of the classics — notable works of philosophy, literature, and history that. I came across Twitter toward the e…
- Books of 2020
I’ve gotten a lot more selective about books to read in the past few years. My 2020 reading goal was 30 books, giving me space to absorb them and take better notes, and to permit reading longer stuff I could take my t…
- A Reverse Dunkirk
In Erik Larson's book The Splendid and the Vile, he tells the story of Britain during the Blitz of 1940-41. In May of 1940, a strategic lapse by the Germans allowed the British to evacuate 330,000 Allied soldiers from…
- Notes on Inspired
I just finished publishing my summary and takeaways from Marty Cagan's Inspired, his collection of ideas on building product teams. A lot of solid fundamentals there for startups, more meat on the bone in this one tha…
- What if Government Paid Better?
In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama has a section on corruption in political systems and how it impacts economic development: There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic develo…
- Second and Third-Order Effects
From Mark Levinson's The Box, on the shipping container and its impact on global trade: The true importance of the revolution in freight transportation would be found not in its effect on ship lines and dockworkers, b…
- The Antilibrary
In The Black Swan, Taleb raises the concept of the "Antilibrary," using author Umberto Eco's personal library of tens of thousands of books as an example. Here's Shane Parrish on Taleb: A good library is filled with m…
- Readwise and Roam Research
If I tracked my time spent in software tools, I'm pretty sure over the last 8 months Roam and Readwise would be top of the list. All of my writing, note-taking, idea logs, and (increasingly) to-dos happen now in Roam.…
- Readwise, Books, and Spaced Repetition
In his piece "Why Books Don't Work," Andy Matuschak made a strong case that books are a poor medium for knowledge transfer. Even with the most advanced book experiences today (like digital ebook downloads to a Kindle)…
- On Legibility
I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott's Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for "legibility" that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emerge…
- Library Notes
Jumping off from my Friday post on literature notes, I’ve taken the first step here in what will hopefully become something more meaningful over time. I just finished up filtering back through all my highlights and no…
- Literature Notes for the Library
With the last several books I've read, I've been trying to force myself to work through and document literature notes for my highlights, key ideas, and takeaways from books. Using a process (that perhaps I'll one day…
- Book Light
I do most of my nighttime reading with my Kindle, but lately I've been reading a couple of books that don't exist in ebook format. I actually do prefer reading paper books as an experience, but I still favor the ebook…
- Audiobooks and Engagement
Recently Nat Eliason started a thread on the subject of audiobooks, and how much lower comprehension and retention is when listening versus reading: Kinda like how it's hard to go back to reading after watching more T…
- SSC Reviews the Origin of Consciousness
Scott Alexander wrote this review of Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which presents a fascinating idea about when the "theory of mind" emerges in human history. When…
- Current Reads
I recently added to my Library section to include the books I'm currently reading. At the top of the page now I'll be including books in the rotation. You'll notice that I'm always reading multiple things at once. Usu…
- Library JSON
Tom Critchlow proposes an open format to create a decentralized, open web version of what Goodreads does — a book social network. Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use some…
- Ken Burns Presents: The Gene
Ken Burns is producing a documentary series adapted from Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Gene: An Intimate History. It's a history of genetics and the human genome. It was one of my favorite books from 2017. Looking f…
- Hardy Boys and Microkids
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers. Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, com…
- Library 2.0
Since I began tracking my reading habits a year and a half ago, I've been able to keep up with it regularly. It lives in a Google Sheet and allows me to log dates I started and finished books, attributes about them, r…
- A Text Renaissance
Venkatesh Rao with his position on the state of text media (the "Four Horsemen of Textopia"), from blogs, to Twitter threading, to ebooks and zines. On blogs and experimenting: One element of my broader response to th…
- Readwise and Instapaper
Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to "read later" service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I'd fallen…
- Back to the Future
New York Times writer Ross Douthat has a new book out called The Decadent Society, which explores how we've arrived in a period of (in the book's terms) stagnation, repetition, sterility, and sclerosis. This post is a…