In no particular order, this is a list of links which have shaped me in one way or another. A list of defining links last decade are available as a PDF here. I also run a small, admin-only WhatsApp Group to share interesting things I come across on the interwebs. DM on X if you’d like an invite.
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
The List of N Things
Half a Herd
David Deutsch’s Dream Machine
What It Means to Be Great
How Apple Rolls
The Shape of Things to Come
Resist and Thrive
The Moral Economy of Tech
Someone is Coming to Eat You
You Are Boring
Haunted By Data
Higher Standards
Christmas Gifts and the Meaning of Design
The Gift of Doubt
The Power of the Marginal
The Heart of the Builder
You Are Not Late
Taste for Makers
E-Mail from Bill
Reckless abandon (is neither)
Spreading Slow Ideas
Good Work Isn’t Enough
The Exquisite Balancing Act for Doing Science Right
Amateurs/Professionals
Can’t play, won’t play
Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
The Tail End
Web Design: The First 100 Years
Why it will never be Day 2 at Amazon
The Gap by Ira Glass (2)
Understanding Local Max
Nassim Taleb | kitlaughlin
Defining the 21st Century
The Art of Not
Human Scale
General and Surprising
What You’ll Wish You’d Known
@20
What Happens Next Will Amaze You
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs by David Sheff
1,000 True Fans
The Curse of Smart People
Generating Ideas at Apple
Special
Stock and flow / Snarkmarket
The Merchandising of Virtue
Pushing And Pulling Goals
Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work
Don’t Be Evil
Keep Your Identity Small
You Are Underestimating the Future
How to Live Unhappily Ever After
Invisible Asymptotes
How Aristotle Created the Computer
When Pixels Collide
The Psychology of Money
Notes from Alan Kay’s Emails
The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink
Improving Ourselves to Death
Curiosity and What Equality Really Means
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple?
The Makers of Things
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
Fix the machine, not the person (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
Feedback Loops
As We May Think
Get The Strategy Right And The Execution Is Easy — AVC
The Strange, True Story of the Man Whose Maid Was Worth Millions
Better - Merlin Mann
Good and Bad Procrastination
Parts Unknown
The end of the beginning
The Friendship That Made Google Huge
The Freakishly Strong Base
On knowing the value of everything and the price of nothing
Nudging the Lexicon
Growth Without Goals
How This All Happened
Unforgiven, Continued
Hypercritical: Beauty, Truth, and Jony Ive
How To Be Successful
Compress to impress
Epistemic learned helplessness
Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport
How I Make Explorable Explanations
Nakatomi Space
The visual magic of comics
Ads Don’t Work That Way
The Pretence of Knowledge
I want
Hell’s Kitchen
Don’t Eat Before Reading This
Status as a Service (StaaS)
A Conspiracy To Kill IE6
The Law of Leaky Abstractions
The Culture of the Market
Fast Software, the Best Software
The Kolmogorov Option
Being basic as a virtue
Lyraull on Twitter
Making Uncommon Knowledge Common
Relentlessly Resourceful
Oppenheimer and the Gita
The Case Against Work-Life Balance: Owning Your Future
Beware of Cranks
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours
Fast · Patrick Collison
Meaning as Ambiguity
The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time
Memos
The Inner Bezos
The End of the Future
It’s Time to Build
Merlin Mann on The Great Discontent
How to Be Polite
Hackers and Painters
The Making of Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino’s and the Cast’s Retelling
Margins
How to Write and What to Write About
A Persistence of Magical Thinking
Who Would Tavi Gevinson Be Without Instagram?
The Interface of a Cheeseburger
Is This Real Life?
Powder
Why Read the Classics
Doing Quality: A modest proposal for honoring Eames
The Economics of Social Status
The Age of Instagram Face
The untold story of what fuels Michael Jordan’s legendary fire
Contrast and Meaning
Embrace the Grind - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice
Looking Closely is Everything
Sir Jony Ive’s 2021 CCA Commencement Honorary Doctorate Address
Amateurs/Professionals
Attack of the Billion-eyed Beast
Everything Must Be Paid For Twice
The Opinion Pageant
Going Critical
The Mythology of Red Bull
How People Think
The Banality of Genius
How to Avoid Half-Heartedness
Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel
The Great Perils of Social Interaction
The Leisurely Manifesto
Principles of Adult Behaviour
Everything is Aiming
Climbing the Wrong Hill
Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct
No News is Good News
There are Three Types of Meetings
Alike Minds Think Great
Notes on Taste
Congratulations on Your Opinion
History is in the Making
I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
Why and how to write things on the Internet
Charlie Munger: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion
Gurwinder’s List of Mind-Expanding Concepts
The Great American Bubble Machine
Yo-Yo Ma, Lily Allen and Trombone Shorty on why their fingers do the talking
Expectations Debt
Your People
101 Design Rules
How to Do Great Work
Don’t be a Doomer
Good Businesses Have Margin
In Good Hands
101 Design Rules
Becoming a Magician
Willingness to Look Stupid
nat.org
In the Now
Internet Artifacts
What Happened to the New Internet?
Grow the Puzzle Around You
How to Build a Life
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
Alar: The Making of an Open-Source Dictionary
The Bharat Ratna No One Talks About
How to Get the Magic Back
Selling Subversion
A Natural History of Beauty
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
On Having Enough Socks
The irresistible mystery of the beautiful batsman
The Indispensability of Risk
Reflections on Palantir
Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy
Lessons from Peter Thiel