I’ve listened to, read, and used a lot more than what is on this list, but this stuff is what I recommend to others. If you want specific recommendations, shoot me an email!
Books
- The Starship and the Canoe is a dual biography of George Dyson and his father Freeman, theoretical physicist.
- Possible Minds - Great collection of essays on AI
- The New Right by my friend Michael Malice. A breakdown of what is going on with the political right and where it came from.
- Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson, a lengthy novel on digital consciousness with another novel in the middle
- Carving out a Living on the Land by Emmet van Driesche - on building a small-scale sustainable business
- Keep Going by Austin Kleon - 10 ways to stay creative. Great addition to his other work
- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
- Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari
- When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink
- Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People by Stephen Wolfram
- Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald - Futuristic moon civilization in civil war
- Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - I wanted to get to this before the Amazon series came out!
- Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places
- Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London - Short essays by Mohsin Hamid
Articles
- Kevin Kelly on Amish Hackers - Amish aren’t anti-technology, they just have long adoption curves and strict criteria
- Abigail Disney on growing up with more money than you can ever spend
- Status as a Service (StaaS)
- Job Title: It’s Complicated
- Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young
- Open gardens by Manton Reece
- Across the Border – Sahil Lavingia
- Gwern’s Dual N-Back FAQ
- Crash’s weekly report on building our business - Morgan von Gunten does a great job assembling this every week
- Meta-Learners - learning how to learn on Fast Forward Labs
- Suzanne Poli’s incredible photos of the LGBTQ marches from Stonewall to today - Not an article, but incredible nonetheless. These photos are a historical treasure.
- How Algorithms Know What You’ll Type Next
New Newsletters I’ve Joined
Don’t call it a comeback. Newsletters have been here for years. Here are new one’s I’ve joined:
- The Art of Gig - Paid newsletter by Venkatesh Rao on indie consulting
- Jocelyn K. Glei’s Hurry Slowly newsletter
- Book Freak newsletter - Weekly newsletter with advice from books
Podcasts
- Writing Online with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Parts 1 and two at the Dialog Podcast. Daring Fireball is one of my favorite
- A bunch of episodes of Cool Tools, my new favorite podcast: Adam Savage, Joshua Bearman, George Dyson
- Crash Log Podcast - Crash engineering team’s podcast
- Becoming a Model Thinker with Scott Page on The Knowledge Project
- Neil Gaiman on Tim Ferriss’s podcast
- The Numberphile Podcast - Great interviews with mathematicians by Brady Haran
- Margaret Atwood on Conversations with Tyler - We actually went to this live!
- Emily Wilson on her new Odyssey translation on Conversations with Tyler
- Emmet Audio - Emmet van Driesche’s daily show. Very short with good tidbits. Half spoon carving, half life.
New Tools
- MailDev - Intercepts outgoing emails during local development and put them in an web inbox on your locahost so you can test.
- ngrok - Secure public URLs to your local development environment. We are using it to catch webhooks from third party services while we test locally
- Story Grid - A method for writing fiction. I’m working through the book while I write something of my own
- CSS Grid Generator - Tool for generating CSS Grid code and learning problems with your own
- Studio Neat’s Tote Book, a great follow up to the Panobook
- Animated Knots - I’ve been tying a lot more knots lately with my boat building. This is a very useful resource.
- Cape Falcon Kayak’s video courses - This is what I’ve been using to learn how to build my kayak and paddle
- Memos - An app that adds text search to your Photos library and allows you to copy it out of photos. Indespensible.
