Links

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

• Object Permanence

• Underrated Ways to Change the World

• Cabel Sasser at XOXO Festival 2024

• 2024 Commencement Address by Roger Federer at Dartmouth

• The Age of Average

• Are You Serious

• How to live an intellectually rich life

• High Agency

Updated on May 03, 2025