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 RightArchived Link 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 LondonArchived Link – 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 weekArchived Link
• 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 newsletterArchived Link – 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 PodcastArchived Link – 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.