Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) – known simply Visa on the internets – is a writer best known for his long-running Twitter/X body of work and the books Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect. He also writes a Substack, visakanv’s Funhouse Mirror, about creativity, introspection, scenes and subcultures, and how people make sense of one another online.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Visa!

Visa’s Picks

The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us

Adam Gopnik | February 2011 | The New Yorker (archive)

This remains my favorite essay of all time. It was written after the smartphone was invented, but before they became ubiquitous. It opens with a great point about how the tech-enabled reality we inhabited in 2011 was already more magical than the world of Harry Potter (first book published in 1997), with kids wondering why Harry and friends had to go to libraries to hunt down spellbooks. Why not just Google it? It goes on to cover some great broad strokes about the history of reactions to developments in media technology: It’s amazing! It’s terrible! It’s kind of the same, really! And how all of them have been right and wrong in varying ways. I think what I really love about this essay is how it’s a great overview of the recurring patterns we’re living in, patterns which might not be obvious to us in the moment, but reveal themselves to anybody who’s done the reading. Adam Gopnik did the reading, and the clarity of his understanding in 2011 somehow has become even more relevant in 2026.

Freshman address at the Boston Conservatory

Karl Paulnack | 2003 | Speech transcript (text transcript)

This speech moved me very deeply when I was an anxious, confused teenager, and has remained central to my understanding of art, and life. Artists are spiritual first responders. They tend to the souls of weary people. When we need art, as Ethan Hawke put it, it’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance. Art, poetry, music, they help people feel things that they need to feel.

Writing this now, I’m noticing a pattern in many of my favorite things: they help me contextualize my small little life in the grander story of humanity, with all its triumphs and tragedies. They help me see where and how I belong.

Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson | ~2010 | YouTube video

Watching this video greatly reduced my creative anxiety as an author. It shifted something inside me about my understanding of how things are made. I came to see that there isn’t much point in “trying to be original” in isolation. You’re much more likely to get to making interesting work by first seeking out as much interesting work as you can find, and recombining it. Try to be interestingly unoriginal. Seek out varied influences from near and far. There’s also an interesting point about perception: even if you somehow were able to create something “truly” original, your audience will not be able to make sense of it except in terms of what they already know, in terms of what came before. So again, you might as well get good at remixing, because it’s the only option there really is.

The theme continues: you find out that Led Zeppelin and Star Wars and Michael Jackson and anything of note is always something part of a lineage, whether they acknowledge it or not. And I feel the world really opens up, feels much more like a large family of relationships rather than an overwhelming collection of disconnected objects.

How to help someone use a computer

Phil Agre | 1996 | Blog post

This is an old guide on how to help someone use a computer. But it’s also so much more than that. In its masterful simplicity and generosity, it simultaneously educates us on “how to be a parent,” or really “how to help anyone with anything.” A nice example of the universal being found within the particular. Striking lines include “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner” and “Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problems on their own.” Please just read the whole thing, it’s short.

You can’t tell people anything

Chip Morningstar | April 2004 | Blog post

This is a very clever piece of writing about a very fundamentally human problem: communication is hard. We are quick to think we understand what someone is saying to us, and to say that we do, even when we actually don’t. You could say there’s a cynicism to it, but I think it’s a healthy sort of cynicism that reveals a deeper optimism, the way George Orwell said “every book is a failure” while choosing to write books anyway. If you’re serious about communicating, you have to acknowledge how it fails, otherwise you’re just deluding yourself about the efficacy of what you’re doing, and it’s not going to be sustainable long-term.

A good place to work

Ben Horowitz | 2012 | Blog post

I believe I first encountered this post when I was working at my last job over a decade ago, and I still share it with my own clients to this day. It’s a very economical telling of a very striking story: a manager at Ben’s company hadn’t done a 1:1 meeting with any of his employees in 6 months. Ben thinks through why this is, and then talks to the manager’s boss about it. He frames the problem in an incredibly compelling way: if the employees aren’t meeting with their manager, the manager has no way to know whether the organization is actually working well, and if that doesn’t change, both the manager and his boss would have to be fired.

Why do I share this post all the time? Aside from it being an example of very clear writing and thinking, I’d say everybody is essentially the CEO of their lives, and we’re each in charge of making sure that our lives are a good place to live. But not many of us do a great job of really thinking this through and attending to the details of it. I often have conversations with people who need a little kick in the ass about this, and Ben’s post is excellent at delivering that. I often need it myself.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch | 2007 | YouTube video / transcript

I first watched this video soon after it was released, and have rewatched it every other year or so. It’s still one of the realest things I’ve seen, someone who really cared about others. It definitely deeply influenced me in thinking about things like, how great it is to enable the dreams of others. How great it is to truly earn the trust and respect of others. Randy is a model of nourishing masculine energy that I was hungry for all my life, and never quite encountered around me except maybe in tiny fragments.

Eve Ensler: Happiness in body and soul

V (formerly Eve Ensler) | 2004 | TED Talk

There are lots of good things about this talk, beginning with the idea that you don’t necessarily know what your life’s work is going to be in advance, and following with the question of “How could you be happy and live in this world of suffering and live in this world of pain?” V goes on to tell harrowing, intimate stories of violence against women, and courageous stories of the women who fought back on their own terms, and how she discovered that “when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.” That’s stayed with me forever since I witnessed it.

Chris Rock on Ferguson, Cosby and Obama

Chris Rock | November 2014 | Interview in Vulture (archive)

Chris Rock is great in interviews. This interview was interesting when it came out, and it’s doubly interesting now that it’s from 12 years ago. On my latest reread I find myself thinking about his description of what I’d call a healthy, clear-eyed contrarianism, where you observe what everyone is doing and think about something truly different to do. I’m sharing this particular interview because it’s one I’ve revisited multiple times, but honestly you can just google “Chris Rock interview” and read any of them. It becomes very unsurprising that he’s so successful at what he does. He’s a very clear thinker and communicator.

A Master Class in Jazz Performance and Creativity with Pianist Kenny Werner

Kenny Werner | 2005 | YouTube video

The most amazing thing about Kenny Werner to me is how he’s able to tell people, with love, that their problem is their ego. It’s a skill that I’ve been trying to cultivate myself, though I suspect it only comes with decades of deep practice and honesty and acceptance. I love this video so much. It’s superficially about how to get better at playing jazz piano, but you don’t need to be a pianist to see that it’s really about how to manage your own psychology, which is really about how to live your life.

Spotlight on Visa’s work

Visa is best known for his Twitter/X body of work at @visakanv, which grew into his books Friendly Ambitious Nerd (2020) and Introspect (2022). His Substack, Funhouse Mirror, is where he explores art-and-media questions, including The Tavern and the Temple and Notes on literacy. A good place to start is Are you serious?, one of his most popular posts.

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Celine Nguyen (@mynameisceline) is a writer, software designer, and literary critic. She writes personal canon, a newsletter about literature, design, art, and technology. Her essays have also appeared in Asterisk, The Atlantic, the LA Review of Books, and Empty Set. She is especially interested in how people develop taste, attention, and a serious relationship to art outside formal institutions.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Celine!

Celine’s Picks

The Center and the Periphery

@Afra Wang ✴︎ April 2026 ✴︎ The Ideas Letter

About ten minutes after meeting Afra Wang—at a friend’s party in London—I found myself discussing all the big questions with her. What’s the difference between Chinese and American techno-optimism? Do we think the world is getting worse or better? I quickly realized that Afra had something insightful to say about nearly everything, from AI policy to literary fiction. I’ve been following her work ever since.

When Matter first asked me to curate an issue, I couldn’t decide which piece of hers to include. I loved Afra’s article for Wired (where she wrote about The Morning Star of Lingao/临高启明, a collectively-authored sci-fi novel published on the Chinese internet); and I return often to her essay for Asterisk (about the Chinese tech canon and what founders read to learn from, and compete with, Silicon Valley).

But my favorite piece of hers might be this essay for The Ideas Letter, where she writes about growing up in China and how students learned to jailbreak their Apple products:

The summer I started high school in Shanxi, I learned that the world had a new texture. It was the early 2010s and I held in my hand for the first time an iPod Touch. I still remember dragging the unlock bar across the screen. The gesture was new—the whole paradigm of touch was new—and the device responded with a light, precise click, a sound as clean as some cosmic voice. I was holding a piece of the future in my hand, and the future had been designed somewhere else.

It’s a beautiful personal essay on the emotional, intuitive relationship we have with technology. It’s also a fascinating look at how experimentation and imitation—studying another company’s products closely, let’s say—can help entrepreneurs come up with new innovations.

All Good Sex is Body Horror

@Becca Rothfeld ✴︎ February 2024 ✴︎ Book excerpt in the New Yorker

A few evenings ago, a friend and I were discussing the essays we admired most, and Rothfeld’s “All Good Sex is Body Horror” came up. We were able to remember specific moments: how the essay began, how Rothfeld brought in specific ideas and philosophers—even though it had been months, years even, since we’d read it.

It’s in Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, which could be described a bit blandly as a book of literary criticism, but which I’d like to describe—a little more idiosyncratically, and perhaps more accurately—as a book about how to live a fuller life, with generous attention paid to the books and films and philosophies that shape our world. Similarly, “All Good Sex is Body Horror” could be described as an essay about David Cronenberg’s films, but it’s also about sexuality, love, and desire.

How Rothfeld gets from a description of David Cronenfeld’s The Fly—a body-horror film about a man turning into a fly—to sexuality is a little mysterious. As in: it feels so entirely natural when Rothfeld’s writing makes that leap, but most people wouldn’t be able to connect these topics so beautifully. But here’s how Rothfeld does it:

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes…No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant…

Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way…To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy…Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.

The Norway Model

Ida Lødemel Tvedt ✴︎ November 2023 ✴︎ The Dial

One of the more harmless national stereotypes I hold is that Norwegians are profoundly well-read. (According to the Finns I surveyed at a wedding last summer, they’re also supposed to be very outdoorsy—but that’s less relevant to this newsletter.) This belief stems from the outsized role that Norwegian literature plays in the literary world: There’s Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023; but also Karl Ove Knausgaard, Dag Solstad, and Vigdis Hjorth (required reading for Sheila Heti fans).

But Norway is a country of less than 6 million people. And why do I know so much about the literature of a country I’ve never been to? Tvedt’s essay tries to answer this, and in the process reveals how literature written in one language makes its way to another. It’s a great read if you’re a fan of literature in translation; it’s also a great read if you just want to be entertained:

Karl Ove Knausgård, Dag Solstad and Jon Fosse — the three most internationally acclaimed Norwegian writers alive — all have personas that fit with foreign imaginations of “the north”…All three have a hermit vibe, eyes lit with dreams of God or Marx. They all seem not to want the public’s eye on them, and yet to really want it, in a manner that works for some kinds of personalities but might seem too coy and self-conscious for others to pull off. Somewhere in my notes I have quoted the American critic James Wood calling them “Norwegian literature’s Little Brain, Big Brain and Galactic Brain,” but I can’t find the citation anywhere and thus suspect I have made it up. Are these long-haired neurotics Great Writers, or are they 1) really good-looking (Knausgård), 2) really good at writing opening scenes and caricaturing his contemporaries (Solstad) and 3) gnostic and icy and unapologetically boring (Fosse)? Will these authors hold up a hundred years from now? I think they might, but for now, who knows. I profoundly love books by all of them, but regarding their Greatness, the jury is out. It is like asking: Are French New Wave films good, or do they just have really nice eyeliner?

And it’s worth noting that the magazine this is published in, The Dial, is—in my opinion—one of the best places to read investigative journalism and literary fiction from around the world. One game I like to play, whenever I’m added to a new groupchat, is to request rankings of the best magazines being published today. I always list The Dial as an S-tier magazine; no one has disagreed with me yet.

How I Became a Filmmaker

Lena Dunham ✴︎ March 2026 ✴︎ Memoir excerpt in the New Yorker

There’s a particular coming-of-age, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/Woman/They/Them–style essay that I’m always looking for. It’s about someone who’s already famous and beloved for their work; it’s about the years before that point, when they were grinding it out in obscurity, trying to not give up.

That’s what this essay is about: Lena Dunham, age 20, making her first short film:

I called it a satire, although I’m not sure I even knew what that meant…It’s that kind of hubris that defines being a young artist, and it should never be beaten out of anyone.

I think what I’m looking for, in these stories, is the recipe for success. Or just the recipe for endurance. Because I’d like to do something good someday, or even great; but how do you make it there, when you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not sure why anyone cares?

Dunham’s essay, which is excerpted from her new-ish memoir Famesick, offers some clues. You find your peers: Josh and Benny Safdie, in her case, whose short screened right after hers at an indie film festival. And you should befriend them:

All I had wanted was to be around people who were making movies—not just talking about movies, or writing about movies on their Blogspots, like the one on which I reviewed Cassavetes films for no one, but actually making them. And now here they were.

The Limits of Data

C. Thi Nguyen ✴︎ 2024 ✴︎ Issues in Science and Technology

Here’s another essay I return to all the time, partly because it’s written by a philosopher whose work touches on all the things I care about: art, technology, information, play. Nguyen (no relation, although I’d love to meet him someday) is a food writer turned philosophy professor, and even his academic writing—like Games: Agency as Art, published by Oxford University Press in 2020—is effortlessly enjoyable to read.

One of the reasons I love Nguyen’s writing is that he is equally concerned with the ineffable and intuitive aspects of life—aesthetic experience, in particular, but also ethics, generosity, community—and the more quantitative parts. This essay is about what we seek from data, and why it’s hard to get it:

I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about the training data. How did they choose to operationalize “good art”? Their reply: they used Netflix data about engagement hours.

The problem is that engagement hours are not the same as good art. There are so many ways that art can be important for us. It can move us, it can teach us, it can shake us to the core. But those qualities aren’t necessarily measured by engagement hours…I said all this. They responded: show me a large dataset with a better operationalization of “good art,” we’ll use it. And this is the core problem, because it’s very unlikely that there will ever be any such dataset.

Now that I’m returning to “The Limits of Data” in 2026, I’m realizing that half of the people I admire are unwaveringly opposed to the idea of AI making art; the other half are busy trying to make it happen. But I think both camps, however much they distrust each other, can find something thought-provoking in Nguyen’s essay. Nguyen elegantly explains why large datasets are valuable and all the forms of knowledge they create. But he also points out the forms of knowledge that can never quite be achieved at scale. “My point,” he writes,

isn’t that we should stop using data-based methods entirely. The key features of data-based methodologies—decontextualization, standardization, and impersonality—are precisely what permit the aggregation of vast datasets and are crucial to reap the many rewards of data-based methodologies…

It’s not like qualitative methods are perfect; every qualitative method opens the door to other kinds of bias. Narrative methods open the door to personal biases. Trusting local, sensitive experts can open the door to corruption. The point is that data-based methodologies also have their own intrinsic biases. There is no single dependable, perfect way to understand or analyze the world.

On Giving Up

Adam Phillips ✴︎ January 2022 ✴︎ London Review of Books

I often come across advice about how it’s okay to fail: to ask for something you might not get, to approach a stranger who might rebuff you, to ship a feature that fails to get meaningful usage, to try out a business idea that fails, to publish something that no one reads.

But if failure is okay, and experiencing it is encouraged, what happens after the failure? Do we keep on going? Do we stop?

The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has a whole book on this subject, but I prefer the shorter (relatively speaking: it’s still 6,000 words) essay that inspired it. “We tend to think of giving up,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes,

as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say we tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves…Giving up, in other words, is usually thought of as a failure rather than a way of succeeding at something else.

Phillips is interested in the positive aspects of giving up. You might be living a life that you don’t really want to live; you might be clinging on to certain assumptions, limiting beliefs, fears. The essay makes use of a wide range of literary references—Kafka, Shakespeare, Camus—to suggest that giving up, sometimes, is good for you. It lets you live a different life, and maybe a better one.

Phillips’s writing can be enigmatic and elliptically repetitive—I’m doing the same thing, in writing about him—but he reaches into the inner workings of the psyche like no other writer I know. This is an essay for when you’re feeling a bit burdened by existence and you don’t know where to go next.

Spotlight on Celine’s work

You can follow Celine on Substack at @celinenguyen and subscribe to her newsletter, personal canon. Her most popular newsletter is research as leisure activity (here’s the Hacker News discussion about it!). If you want a deep cut, try this 10,000-word newsletter on what AI art can learn from Fluxus artists like John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik.

She also writes about design, technology, and art for other publications:

• “Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?” for Asterisk

• “The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’” for The Atlantic

• “Seeing Like a Simulation” for the LA Review of Books

• “The Afterlives of Computer Art” for Empty Set

And if you’re a podcast person:

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Sarah Sherman (@sshhherman) is a creative director and cultural strategist at SpecialGuest, where she’s led creative work for Lyft, OpenAI, and Bumble. She’s also a documentary filmmaker, writer, and sometime creative coach for emerging talent. Before SpecialGuest, she helped build the The Atlantic’s Brand Studio and worked on Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary projects for CNN, Al Jazeera America, CMT, Netflix, and PBS.

Her Substack, Radical Hearsay, focuses on “gut feelings, nauseating memories, and occasionally fiction that’s not always announced as such,” to use her words. You can find her on Substack at @sshhherman and on her website.

[Ben’s note: Hot new Substack alert! Sarah recently restarted her Substack with a personal essay that will rock your socks. It’s free for now, get in.]

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Sarah!

Sarah’s Picks

Victory Lap

George Saunders | 2009 | Short Story

This George Saunders story, the first in his Tenth of December collection, is a masterclass in how to pull the heart out of your reader’s chest cavity, hold it in your hand, and then gently place it back, changed. It is difficult, both in form and subject matter, and demands you pay real, deep attention to every tiny beat of the moments in which it takes place. But it’s one I will read again and again, finding something new and perfect every time.

My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers

Caity Weaver | 2014 | Essay

I learned more about humor, voice, and whole-ass writing from this piece than anything else I have ever read. I also will never look at mozzarella sticks the same way again. If you want to cackle so hard that anyone within earshot (through the bathroom door, next to you on the train, beside you in bed) has to ask what you’re possibly reading, read this — and really anything by Caity Weaver, while you’re at it. (Her GQ profile era was particularly standout: Dwayne Johnson for President)

Art & Fear

David Bayles & Ted Orland | 1993 | Book

This is a short book that I found to be singularly direct and convincing in the way it speaks to people who aspire to make any kind of art. The central communication (or the one that landed most centrally for me) is that every shitty little thing you tell yourself about your craft — whether that’s painting, playing music, writing — is, by definition, part of the process. They are voices to be normalized, not heeded, as you push yourself to keep going. It’s the kind of book that anyone who wants to take risks and make stuff should keep in the drawer of their bedside table, among hair ties and discarded earplugs and vibrators, like mine. (Thank you to my friend Sarah Ransohoff for putting it on my radar.)

a vacation from the future

Sean Monahan | 2025 | Newsletter Essay

I open Sean Monahan’s 8ball newsletter, more than any other newsletter I get, and I get a lot. Reading him feels like LARPing; suddenly, I’m in Los Feliz, hungover, drinking cold brew, ripping cigarettes, and nodding vigorously along to my friend’s brilliant takes. Sean Monahan is a trend forecaster and consultant who is credited with coining “vibe shift” and “normcore.” He regularly delivers feverish but somehow precise brain dumps about what he’s seeing and experiencing in culture. When I forwarded this particular post to a few friends, I wrote “this is a little unhinged and raw but so fucking on point.” That is Sean. An excerpt:

All that GDP and what does American life look like for the next generation? Cavernous white condos where we hide under microplastic shedding blankets with our phones on Do Not Disturb while we scroll and scroll and scroll, waiting for the DoorDash delivery to be left at our door with a ghostly knock we are too agoraphobic to answer.

The Silence

Junot Diaz | 2018 | Essay

In some ways, this is a proxy for Junot Diaz’s whole body of work. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown are among my very favorite books. While those are fiction, this is a personal essay about childhood trauma. It stays with me, not so much as the content itself, but as the physical memory of what it feels like to be so gripped by a story that you have to stop what you’re doing (in my case, walking home from the subway in Brooklyn), sit down (on a park bench), finish it with 100% of your focus (despite pigeons and sirens), and stay there for a few minutes afterwards processing what you’ve just read. Tell me: what is better than that? It’s worth noting that the cultural and societal context for its publication is complicated. Unfortunately, people theorized at the time that he published it in order to distract from sexual harassment allegations that he knew were coming. For what it’s worth, he still teaches at MIT and publishes regularly. Regardless, this isn’t the place for that discourse.

Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

Henrik Karlsson | 2024 | Essay

I am prone to the unforgivably corny practice of writing existential reminders on post-its and sticking them to the rim of my monitor. “Open loops” is one of them, referencing an excerpt from Karlsson’s post:

Unintentionally, I would tell my brain to focus on something else—a conflict in a TV series I was watching, for instance. I would watch an episode before bed, and the cliffhanger would open a loop in my head. That loop would be churning in my head as I slept; I woke to a blank page. I don’t have time for that anymore. I make sure to always have an open loop concerning my writing. And I close every other loop—by wrapping it up as fast as I can, or by writing it down on a list, or, preferably, by not opening the loop at all.

I have found that advice in which the spiritual and practical collide like this is often the most powerful.

The “Quiet Catastrophe” Brewing in Our Social Lives

Ezra Klein | 2023 | Podcast

After I listened to this podcast, I was genuinely inspired to explore co-living with friends and their families. For many reasons, this became less of a priority (in the near term, at least). But the discussion around the inevitable friction and discomfort that comes with cohabitation — particularly the idea of choosing “community problems” over individual ones — felt so true and fresh, and it stays with me as I endeavor to inconvenience myself more in service of the people I love.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

William Deresiewicz | 2008 | Essay

This is the essay that preceded Deresiewicz’s 2015 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite. It’s a little dated and meandering, but as a parent of a toddler, it rocked me. I felt so seen in the quiet pain I have often felt in not being able to hear my own inner voice — and the regret I used to feel about falling victim to the achievement industrial complex. It marked the beginning of my engagement with the idea that college might not be a good thing for my own child, which is, of course, a perspective that is becoming increasingly mainstream. This interview with Deresiewicz, starting around the 24-minute mark, gets at a lot of these ideas and more.

Honey

Robyn | 2018 | Song

Because Robyn is a goddess and doesn’t need real beat drops to make your mitochondria shimmy. Good background music for reading all of the above.

Spotlight on Sarah’s Work

Follow Sarah on Substack at @sshhherman and subscribe to Radical Hearsay. Some of her meatier pieces are below:

• Always Double Check

• Some Kind of Devotion

• Manifest More Jump Scares

• Nothing is Not About Dosing

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Polina Pompliano (@polinapompliano) is the founder of The Profile, an independent media company known for longform profiles of influential founders, investors, athletes, executives, and cultural figures. Before launching The Profile in 2017, she spent five years at Fortune, where she wrote Term Sheet, the publication’s daily newsletter on venture capital and private equity. She is also the author of Hidden Genius: The Secret Ways of Thinking That Power the World’s Most Successful People, a book about how exceptional people reason through problems, use creativity, and perform under pressure.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Polina!

Polina’s Picks

“Embrace Your True Self: Mount Holyoke Commencement Speech” (speech)

Anna Quindlen | 1999

This powerful speech is what gave me the courage to leave my full-time job at FORTUNE Magazine to pursue The Profile full-time. Her words have encouraged me to bet on myself time and time again.

Quindlen argues that success has to be measured internally, not just by how it looks to the world.

How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million (profile)

Taffy Brodesser-Akner | 2018

This is one of my favorite profiles because it achieves the impossible: it turns a celebrity profile into a case study on ambition, motherhood, and status. What I love most about Taffy Brodesser-Akner (the writer of the piece) is that her profiles are almost never just about the subject. She explores the culture orbiting around the subject and, in the process, reveals something uncomfortable and true about all of us. Her writing is psychologically precise, funny, and skeptical. This profile is a work of art.

The Secret History of Tiger Woods (profile)

Wright Thompson | 2016

This incredible profile is about Tiger Woods, but it’s not really about Tiger Woods. It’s about anyone who has ever experienced profound loss, grief, and inexplicable loneliness. Wright Thompson — the writer of the piece — said: “Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody’s life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it.”

Lost and Found (essay)

Colson Whitehead | 2001

Every Sept. 11, I share Colson Whitehead’s Lost and Found essay, which was published two months after the Twin Tower attacks. The article is a moving tribute to New York City and the Twin Towers, but it’s also about how our identities are shaped by our own, personalized memories of the places we live.

Whitehead writes that “our streets are calendars,” and that our old places become proof of who we were and where we have been.

Travel Is No Cure For the Mind (essay)

Lawrence Yeo | 2019

Lawrence Yeo explores different facets of the human condition — from death and fear to anxiety and self-doubt — through thoughtful essays paired with playful illustrations. This particular piece argues that travel, contrary to popular belief, isn’t necessarily the key to happiness.

The Choice (memoir)

Edith Eger | 2017

In her memoir, Edith Eger recounts her journey from Auschwitz survivor to renowned psychologist. She describes the unimaginable experiences she endured, including being forced to dance for the infamous “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele. Eger reflects on how surviving the horrors of the Holocaust ultimately taught her how to live again with unshakable resilience and hope. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Spotlight on Polina’s Work

The Profile - Polina’s original profiles, columns, dossiers, interviews, learning guides, and newsletter editions from the last nine years live here. Recent profiles include pieces on Saquon Barkley, Ryan Serhant, Anthony Scaramucci, Kathryn Wylde, and Jake and Logan Paul.

Hidden Genius - Polina’s book studies how high performers reason through problems, unleash their creativity, navigate relationships, and perform under pressure.

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Bentham’s Bulldog is a visiting scholar at Forethought, starting a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton next year. He blogs about effective altruism, the existence of God, animal welfare, utilitarianism, and other topics in philosophy and politics.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Bentham’s Bulldog!

Bulldog’s Picks

Famine, Affluence and Morality

Peter Singer, 1972

Famine, Affluence, and Morality is one of the most influential works of philosophy ever written. It makes the case clearly that we have a duty to donate a lot more than we typically do. Uncontroversially one would be obligated to pull a nearby child out of a pond, but there are children dying all the time who we can save at comparatively minor cost. We should, to a far greater extent than we tend to.

The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

Brian Tomasik, April 9, 2015

Nearly all sentient beings who will ever live are wild animals. Plausibly nearly all the joy and misery in the world is experienced by wild animals, but we normally ignore their interests. This piece convinced me that we should take wild animal suffering seriously, and that the interests of wild animals matter. Every second trillions of conscious beings are crying out in agony and terror. That matters, if anything does.

500 Million, But Not a Single One More

Dec 9, 2014

This inspiring piece describes the eradication of smallpox. It’s a nice reminder of the amazing things humanity can accomplish when we set our mind to some task. As the piece says, “This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed,”

Why God Exists | Fine-tuning, Beauty, and Discoverability

Dustin Crummett July 11, 2018

For most of my life, I was an atheist. A big part of that changing was thinking through the arguments in this piece. While I wasn’t immediately convinced when I first read it, I eventually was brought around by these arguments after thinking through them carefully (plus a few others).

The Dilbert Afterlife

Jan 16, 2026

In Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, speakers are called after someone dies. They provide an honest portrayal of the person’s life, aiming to truly capture what the person was like. As part of this process, you come to understand the person, and you feel some kind of deep empathy for them—the sort that comes from really knowing a person. Scott Alexander’s piece on Scott Adams is this kind of speaking for the dead. Even if you didn’t like Adams in life, it is hard to come away from the piece not feeling a kind of deep caring for him.

How Do I Love Thee?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My favorite poem. It nicely captures true love—a deep caring for the other person, from which pleasant feelings flow, rather than merely the presence of pleasant feelings.

Being John Rawls

Mar 19, 2026

This one is a bit hard to describe until you’ve read it, but it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. Really mindboggling work of genius.

Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

This book by the philosopher Michael Huemer provides a fairly broad introduction to philosophy, covering most of the big topics. It discusses epistemology, ethics, free will, and more. Most of all, it shows how philosophy ought to be done—how philosophical argument works, and how we might be moved, by abstract argument, to change what we once believed.

The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing

Michael Huemer Dec 26 2021

Breathtakingly beautiful piece about life and death.

Preparing For The Intelligence Explosion

and 11th March 2025

AI is already a big deal. But this piece makes the case that it will have truly earth-shattering effects, prompting rapid economic growth and introducing a range of global challenges. A whole century’s worth of economic growth may be compressed into just a single decade, or even less. That we might experience a hundred years of growth in ten sounds outrageous—it’s the kind of claim that is important to know if it is true. PREPIE powerfully argues that it is.

Spotlight on Bulldog’s Work

If You’re To Die - Andrew Sullivan did his best work thinking he’d die young of HIV. Bulldog uses that as a prompt to ask what legacy he’d want if he had a year left, and lands on fighting factory farming, helping wild animals, and getting more people to give effectively.

The Best Thing You Can Do - Pitch for the Giving What We Can pledge. Give 10% of your income to effective charities and you save roughly a kid a year from malaria.

The Fine-Tuning Argument Simply Works - A grand tour through every standard objection to fine-tuning (anthropic principle, multiverse, deeper laws, etc.) arguing none of them are satisfying.

The Bluesky Way of Arguing - Defense of being a “debate bro”: if you’re going to call someone an idiot in public, have the spine to debate them.

What To Do If You Love Meat But Hate Factory Farms? - Per FarmKind’s calculator, about $23 a month to top animal charities is enough to make your net impact on every kind of animal positive, even if you keep eating them.

Brought to you by Matter

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Ashlee Vance (@ashleevance) is the founder of Core Memory, a science and technology media company spanning a Substack, podcast, YouTube show, and documentary films. Before going independent in early 2025, Ashlee spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek, where he hosted the Emmy-nominated Hello World video series. Earlier in his career, he covered tech for The New York Times. He is the author of the #1 bestselling Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future and When the Heavens Went on Sale, which inspired the HBO documentary Wild Wild Space. His next book, on OpenAI, is already optioned for film.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Ashlee!

Ashlee’s Picks

Emma Goldman Archive

I’ve been in love with Emma Goldman since my days in high school. She was an anarchist who became a celebrity intellectual in the early 1900s in the U.S. Her words and story always remind me of what real passion looks like. I’m not sure I believe in anything as much as Goldman believed in her world view. I would like to believe in things.

101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory

The author Terry McDermott embeds himself inside the lab of the eccentric and brilliant neuroscientist Gary Lynch. McDermott spends enough time with Lynch that the lab and its rhythms and soul come alive for the reader. It’s the sort of thing that I love. You hang out and hang out until you begin to see actual truths. I’ve been chasing the chance to do something like this for years and aspire to find my Lynch.

West of Eden: An American Place

Jean Stein’s oral history of California changed me. It forced me to love and hate California more. Stein’s mastery of the oral history format filled me with jealousy. Stein makes this look easy, but she must have put in an incredible amount of work to pull this off. It’s the kind of book that leaves you feeling inadequate and aspirational at the same time.

Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat

For me, Bobby Fingers is the most creative person alive. His YouTube channel is somehow ignored by most of the public, and, yet, he’s hilarious and an artistic polymath with no equal. YouTube and the public reward the Mr. Beasts. We’d be a better civilization with Bobby Fingers at the helm.

A Bone of Fact

It’s not very easy to find this book, which is the autobiography of the gambler David Walsh. Walsh tends to make everything in his life exotic and indulgent, and his book is no different. I have begged to interview this man for years with no luck. His extraordinary life story only makes me want him more.

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

Sometimes I fear that we’re becoming very boring as people. Fitter, happier, more productive and all that. This is a good reminder of the bliss of excess and how to write about it.

Pandora’s Vox

Humdog – aka Carmen Hermosillo – wrote this in 1994. I read it about once a year to remind myself of what the early days of the internet and being online felt like to those who were obsessed with the arrival of this technology from day one. “i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself” arriving before most people had ever heard of the internet will/should haunt you.

Dead Man

Hardly anyone watched this movie when it came out. Fewer have watched it since. Johnny Depp is polarizing, I suppose, and people might struggle to take him seriously in this. But, dang, when I really want to wallow and go slow, this is the movie for me. Neil Young. Jim Jarmusch. A William Blake fever dream. What else do you want?

Spotlight on Ashlee’s Work

Welcome to ProtoTown: How this Texan Startup Ranch Plans to Save America

They’ve Revived Dead Brains. And Now We Might Finally Get Some Cures

Core Memory

They’ve Revived Dead Brains. And Now We Might Finally Get Some Cures

The courier arrived with the human brain early in the morning…

Listen now

3 months ago · 18 likes · Ashlee Vance

When the Heavens Went on Sale

Don’t Die

Words That Matter is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made it their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors – in fact, Matter was App of the Day last week!

Zohar Atkins (@ZoharAtkins) is the founder of Lightning, an ed tech company focused on inspiring learning as a way of life. Read his manifesto here. He is also a rabbi who writes about philosophy, religion, and culture on his Substack What Is Called Thinking? and pens a weekly Torah commentary at Etz Hasadeh. Atkins is a Rhodes Scholar, a Hiett Prize winner, and an Emergent Ventures Fellow.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Zohar!

Zohar’s Picks

The Mice

Lydia Davis | 2010

I’m obsessed with Lydia Davis’s work, especially her very short stories. I regard her as a formal genius. She compresses so much humor, wit, and psychological insight into every word. Her stories capture the intimate experience of thinking and processing the world in a way that is almost claustrophobic. Like David Foster Wallace, her subjects, including her semi-autobiographical “I”, are often mentally imbalanced and deeply warped, yet there is a humanity and charm conveyed by seeing the world through their eyes. Start with her Collected Stories. I found my way to Davis, strangely, via the experimental poet Rae Armantrout, whose work I also esteem. Davis feels adjacent to what is called “language poetry”, or poetry that is about language itself, yet her work provides more narrative movement and manages to be both avant-garde and accessible, a rare feat not achieved by her peers.

The Secret Miracle

Jorge Luis Borges | 1943

I adore Borges, who manages to express complex philosophical ideas via deeply erudite and intertextually rich stories. This story is about a young writer who composes his masterpiece in his head right before getting shot by a firing squad. The story itself defies logic by conveying to us an event that is itself impossible to witness. Just as miracles require faith, and cannot be proven, so too, we are asked to believe in this secret miracle, the miracle of a person finding a sense of completion even under dire conditions.

Larry David on Anonymous Giving

Larry David | 2013

This clip will make you laugh the next time you see a donor plaque labeled “anonymous.”

Harold Bloom Reads Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens | 2010

Wallace Stevens is a philosopher’s poet and a poet’s philosopher. While philosophers offer theories of the world, Stevens shows his theories. As I read him, he’s an idealist who believes reality is created by the mind. He’s not an absolute idealist who thinks there’s no real there outside of us, but he is a kind of subjectivist who thinks consciousness is creative. All “I”s are poets, and all poets impose their song on the world. Bloom’s reading is impassioned. Whether you agree with his theories or not, his net effect was to mainstream his love and appreciation for poetry, including difficult poets like Stevens, and for that I’m grateful.

The Storyteller

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was a giant who died tragically before his time. His sentences are spells. His Marxism is bonkers and outdated, but his meditations on literature, art, and history, often drawing on Jewish mysticism and esotericism, are stunningly creative. The Storyteller defends the lost tradition of storytelling in an age of information, a work of cultural criticism that still resonates. Benjamin argues that we’ve lost the ability to experience the world. Of course, people share stories all the time; some now make livings live-streaming their lives. But Benjamin is talking about something else, the idea of oral tradition, of taking folklore and subtly adapting it to the world you find yourself in. Perhaps these stories have lost their power because the world is accelerating. Or perhaps the business model of the storyteller simply doesn’t work in the age of new media. In either case, this piece will have you feeling nostalgic for something you can’t quite touch.

A Separation

Asghar Farhadi | 2011

This is a heavy film, but also one that captures the fundamental uncertainty and unreliability of perspective. I’m not a relativist, but this film portrays the experience of multiple, conflicting truths, each having validity.

The Tyrant as Editor

Holly Case | 2013

Did you know Stalin was an editor? This piece shows that power rests less with the author than the editor, in large part precisely because the editor is hidden from view. Worth considering again in the age of AI, where the people determining model output are hidden from view yet decisive for what we end up doing and thinking.

Spotlight on Zohar’s Work

• What Is Called Thinking? (Philosophy Blog)

• Etz Hasadeh (Torah Blog)

• Second Voice (AI and Education Blog)

• Alexandria (AI Guide to Great Books)

• Yochai (AI Guide to Torah; Sign up for Beta)

Words That Matter is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made it their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors – in fact, Matter is App of the Day today, April 25!

Cate Hall (@catehall) is the author of the Useful Fictions (Ben’s favorite Substack of the past year) and the forthcoming book You Can Just Do Things, co-written with her husband Sasha Chapin. Cate is a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-#1 ranked female poker player in the world. She co-founded Alvea, a pandemic medicine company, and was CEO of the Astera Institute, a multibillion dollar foundation for scientific moonshots.

[Ben’s note: Hold up! Before you go further, take 90 seconds to pre-order Cate’s book. It’s going to be a big deal, and you’ll probably want it when the book tour starts, but what you may not know is pre-orders are ~2x-5x better for authors than day-of-release sales (because of things like print runs and retail placement)… so, do it now and be a force multiplier for a book that is going to help lots of people live with more agency.]

Without further ado, please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Cate!

Cate’s Picks

The Goddess of Everything Else

| 2015

A gorgeous allegory of the forces of cooperation and competition, as personified by the title character and the Goddess of Cancer. I love this piece because it reminds me that everything good in the world doesn’t just arise in spite of the bad, but in a perverse way because of it. I’m so envious of Scott’s ability — it doesn’t seem like the same mind should be able to produce The Goddess of Everything Else and Meditations on Moloch and Unsong and The Toxoplasma of Rage and Samsara and a dozen other world-historically good pieces of writing across multiple genres, but here we are.

Cat’s Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut | 1963

I think I’ve read this book five times, which is 2.5 times more than my next-most-read book. It is both a totally straightforward, easy to read short novel and a work of incredible inventiveness and wisdom. “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy” is as close to a personal ethos as I have — it’s from this and “all models are wrong, but some are useful” that I took the name of my blog, Useful Fictions.

The Egg

Kurzgesagt / Andy Weir | 2019 / 2009

Originally published by Andy Weir in 2009, rendered in its canonical animated form by Kurzgesagt a decade later. A work of great beauty that has exerted a buffering effect on my sanity throughout different eras of my life, acting like a psychedelic during my most grounded times and a grounding influence during my most psychedelic (psychotic) times.

The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Rainer Maria Rilke | 1905

The only good poetry about God I’ve ever found. (You are welcome to point me to better.) My favorite of the bunch is Go to the Limits of Your Longing.

Dream Mashups

Malcolm Ocean | 2021

A psychologically load-bearing blog post for me. Though it’s worth reading in full, you can download the thesis from the first paragraph: “Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and whatever old emotional meanings are getting activated by the current situation. Like dreaming you’re at your high school but it’s also on a boat somehow.”

[Note: this link sometimes fails to open in Chrome but works fine in Safari.]

No Hard Feelings

The Avett Brothers | 2016

A perfect song. Better listened to than read, as songs tend to be.

For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough

Charles Bukowski | 1962

I always feel a little weird saying I love Bukowski’s poetry because he had a habit of hitting women, and people reasonably don’t like men who hit women. But the truth is I feel a lot of … not sympathy, but camaraderie with him. Bukowski is the patron saint of alcoholics and degenerates, and I’ve been both. This poem, written six months after the horrifying, alcoholism-related death of the great love of his life, is the best poem about love or grief I’ve ever read.

Anything by Sasha Chapin

| Various

It’s good to be married to your favorite writer. Romeo Stevens has said, of much writing on meditation, something like “it sounds like poetry before it happens to you and an instruction manual afterward.” Sasha’s writing is the only work I know of on spirituality / awakening that consistently avoids this trap — we are lucky to have him as a translator. Some recent examples:

• Notice your limp heart until it becomes a rose-colored meteor

• Love and death, kiki and bouba

• We need your spiritual gifts

• As sweet as razor blade honey

Spotlight on Cate’s Work

Cate’s book about personal agency, You Can Just Do Things, is coming out July 21. You can order it here. People like Tim Urban, Arthur C. Brooks, Lori Gottlieb, and Charles Duhigg have said very nice things about it.

Cate wrote a revealing post about the process of writing the book – Writing a book is a labor of love – and I also recommend Sasha’s reflection – Pre-order our book, or, what’s so special about Cate?.

Some of Cate’s other writing on agency:

• Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

• How to be more agentic

• How to instantly be better at things

• Are you stuck in movie logic?

• How to increase your surface area for luck

You Can Just Do Things is a prison break instruction manual — a wildly empowering how-to guide for getting out of your own way so you can realize your true potential.

— Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why and bestselling author of What’s Our Problem?

Words That Matter is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Our curator this week is Anna Gát (@TheAnnaGat). Anna is the founder and CEO of Interintellect, a platform reviving French salon culture for the digital age. Since 2019, Interintellect has hosted tens of thousands of depolarized conversations online and offline—from grand salons with Esther Perel, Daron Acemoglu, or Tyler Cowen to intimate firesides among curious strangers. Anna trained as a philosopher of art and dramaturg, published her first book of poetry at 19, and was nominated for European film awards as a screenwriter, before turning to dialogue technology. She writes the Substack American Innocence.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Anna!

Anna’s Picks

To think originally, one needs to read originally. In my new essay “The Sovereign Reader” I wrote: “The more unique and personalized the books you read, the more original a thinker you will become. This, in short, is how you become you. I am a strong post-Hegelian believer in the personal duty of coming into our full being throughout our lives. Other than finding a fitting occupation and worthy life companions, cultivating your own mind is the prerequisite for building an existence for yourself that is truly yours.”

“bye, mom”

It has long been my view that one of the best writers alive today is the escort and sex researcher Aella. Whether she writes about intimacy, her upbringing in an abusive Evangelical home that she later fled, psychedelics, or how status works in society, she is insightful, honest, poetic, and often right.

Even among her many great pieces, this one hits differently. Aella, more conscious of her internal processes and better at verbalizing them than almost anybody that I read, cares for her dying mother, sees her die, and then mourns her. Having recently lost a parent in a similar way myself, I was struck by the fragile accuracy, the complete, membrane-like transparency of this daughter’s account. A fearless, rare gem of a text, forged the hard way.

I know from several Aella pieces that their relationship was not easy. To write such a tribute is a glorious act of forgiveness and intellect for that reason alone.

Plato’s Cave at the Drive-in Theater

The NYU cultural historian Robles-Anderson is concerned with “American collectivity”. We are being constantly told that this is the “age of loneliness”, that people have lost touch with their rituals of togetherness, their shared identities.

Robles-Anderson disagrees. In her work, the many functioning arenas of collectivity in American life take legible shape. The basketball court, the megachurch, the drive-in theater.

It seems like Americans have always been coming together, and always contrasted their private and public realities in spaces that are public or semi-public.

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan

I have been fascinated by Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher, since her work on philosophical genealogy (which ideas lead to which other ideas). I mentioned her in my first recommendation list for Matter. I am including her again because I have long been convinced that “Freud is back”. And now it seems like excellent theoreticians like Srinivasan or Merve Emre also agree.

It remains to be seen whether going into therapy is really that beneficial after all. I have my doubts. But Freud having been groundbreaking is unquestionable: he created a paradigm shift in how we understand ourselves and each other at a level previously reserved for people like Darwin. We have never recovered.

Where do irrational ideas and behaviors come from? You might approach this question from a direction familiar to Bay Area rationalists or the New Atheists. Or you might want to go and revisit Dr. Freud.

On the Genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen's Most Important Literary Predecessor

A. Natasha Joukovsky

Every person interested in “scenius” – the idea that talent isn’t really individual, rather something that arises from camaraderie and competition, i.e., group dynamic – must read this revisionist piece by the novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky.

Why do we keep portraying Jane Austen, a literary history changing writer and innovator of prose, as if she had popped out of the woodwork without any precedent whatsoever?

In her essay, Joukovsky argues that this was far from the case. There is always an ancestor to genius, and in this case it was Frances Burney. Have you heard of her? Now you will. Jane Austen certainly had.

(In all fairness, the erasure was not Austen’s fault. It is hard for a woman to occupy a literary position, etc., etc., and so the other women “had” to be removed from around her, it seems.)

All Good Sex Is Body Horror

One of my absolute favorite readings from the past years. Rothfeld, a generational essayist, since then hired up by the New Yorker, writes about the mad artistry of the body horror director David Cronenberg – the transgression, the carnality of his movies – through the prism of her own lustful marriage. What Michel Foucault would have called “limit-experiences”, Rothfeld describes her own sensual awakening when first meeting her now-husband, and the boundary-crossing that is inherent to any such event.

She sees the director of Crash and The Fly as uniquely honest at describing an experience fundamental to human existence: that love and a desire for destruction are somehow one, that pleasure and disgust can both save us from triviality; that any real encounter is a physical metamorphosis after which nothing can remain the same. Not even us.

Rothfeld goes far beyond a simple review of Cronenberg’s works. To her, contemporary notions of “consent” feel meaningless. It is not to comfort that real eroticism consents to, she says, but risk. Some artists, like Cronenberg, understand this urge for transformation.

50 Things I Know

In a sea of mediocre, navel-gazing self-help writing, the courageous, complicated, and athletic Cate Hall has been a consolation. Like everyone else, I also do need advice literature, and being able to engage with such a smart, raw, and out-of-the-box writer has been a pleasure. Whenever I read Hall, I think: “Finally.”

Hall is best known for her writing on agency, love, and addiction. She is currently about to publish a book with her husband Sasha Chapin. She has led an unorthodox life.

What I love about her piece “50 Things I Know” is that even where I don’t agree with her, I can be sure her advice comes from a place of real experience. Hall, without any hidden agenda, is sharing the truths and strategies that have kept her going. A useful and uplifting read about work, happiness, talent, and people.

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Wherever you stand on the infamous Lucy Letby case – A raging psycho? A failure of the British judiciary system? – Aviv’s arresting investigation will give you something to think about.

When a crime as horrific as the possible murder of multiple newborn babies occurs, people, already unstable in their judgment and biases, become almost blind to the facts, mere vehicles of motivated reasoning.

In this case, gaping flaws in statistical methodology are contrasted with the conventional wisdom of decades of practical experience. How to know what really happened? Do you believe the science or your own eyes?

I left Aviv’s exceptional article with a darker view of human nature. Not just because of how our fellow citizens may harbor criminal inclinations, but that we, the rest, the good, are so bad at reasoning about it.

The Great Leap Backward

Lea Ypi – the celebrated political memoirist of Free – has become a symbol of intellectual resistance and survival. The Romanian medievalist, poet, and literary critic Dumitrescu reads her otherwise.

Critics of Free take issue with Ypi’s equating of Communist oppression (in her native Albania) and capitalist inequality (in her family’s chosen new life in the West). Dumitrescu’s skepticism runs deeper: she suspects this autobiography to be even more autobiographical than it seems. She thinks that while Ypi does attempt to write about politics, what she really ends up writing about is her belligerent relationship with her mother. Imagine that.

This is one of my favorite recent book reviews: I keep thinking whether any memoir can ever be – if not objective – then at least self-aware. Dumitrescu doesn’t think so.

Against Nature

Jane Kramer

As a European art philosopher turned media startup founder living in America, I find it hilarious that American and French philosophers don’t understand each other at all. You can go to conferences, and observe people who are giants within their own cultural contexts, surrounded by kowtowing students and wannabe groupies at all times – they are the intellectual celebrities who just cough and everyone starts taking notes – and whose status means absolutely nothing when they’re dropped into each other’s worlds, their fame and value being mutually illegible.

A great example of this is the brilliant French philosopher Élisabeth Badinter, a paradigm-shifting feminist in her native France and close to nobody in the United States of America. She, as Kramer quotes her, now won’t even visit America because she can’t smoke here (and because of a humiliating exchange she was subjected to at Princeton).

On a mission to ground feminism on Enlightenment values, Badinter today counts as an interesting controversy within French academia, older, unfashionably elite, but knowledgeable and disciplined. But her work – her words – just doesn’t translate to the American language of discourse.

I love Kramer’s ambivalence in this piece which always makes me ponder about how siloed most intellectual effort is, and how relative and circumstantial is status.

As Long as You Both Shall Live

Merve Emre

“This is the obvious yet shocking revelation that anchors the film: every parent’s marriage plot is her child’s Bildung.” – this is the sentence that stayed with me for the past couple of years from Emre’s review of the formidable movie Anatomy of a Fall.

It is, of course, about much more than just a movie. What Emre probes is the ability of women to tell the story of women in a way that resonates with everyone and in a way that is not so unflatteringly true that women themselves would resist admitting the resonance.

I remember reading this review first, and only being able to watch Anatomy of a Fall sometime later. Emre is far more interested in the narratives of private life than spoiling the movie for us. Is every family just a matter of perspective? Do “canonical” realities exist between people who share their lives?

Good art criticism should always be somehow about all of life. I remember this review fondly because it so well succeeds.

The Instrumentalist

Zadie Smith

The great British GenX novelist and literary critic Zadie Smith uses the controversial 2022 movie Tár as a starting point to explore fame and public intellectuals in the internet era.

The essay scandalized many because here is a Black literary genius in the post Me Too era going at a movie about a cancellation from a completely different angle.

One of the most interesting ideas in this essay, about which I think often, is that the internet has killed the ad hominem. In classical rhetorics, it used to be a no-no fallacy to dismiss a claim because of who said it. Smith claims that on the internet such distinctions would be ridiculous. Online we are our opinions – one entity, indivisible. Where do ideas end and where do people who think them begin? Smith finds the fundamental problem with all of cancel culture in this unprecedented logical puzzle.

After Habermas

Nancy Fraser

A few weeks ago, the great German postwar philosopher Jürgen Habermas passed away at nearly 100 years old. Obituaries and essays are still pouring in from philosophers and sociologists, and people eager to point out that Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote his PhD about him.

It is important to get acquainted with Habermas without either the praise or the malice. In this piece, the American Marxist-feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser eulogizes Habermas in a matter-of-fact and balanced way. Habermas started out as her mentor, someone she was drawn to as a thinker because he treated culture as a separate domain within society, as an area of liberation. Eventually, writes Fraser, she had to leave Habermas behind, only to later reconnect with him.

Fraser’s politics are not mine, but there should be more frank and personal commemorations written like this one. For someone like Fraser, committed to debate above all else, this is a way to give us a much-needed lesson in integrity.

Spotlight on Anna’s Work

A few pieces of note from Anna’s work:

• The Sovereign Reader

• On Not Disappearing

• Strangers

• Grieving in America

You can subscribe to her Substack here and Twitter here.

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Nan Ransohoff (@nanransohoff) leads Stripe Climate and founded Frontier, a $1B+ advance market commitment for permanent carbon removal. More broadly, her work focuses on incentive design to help solve important societal problems. Previously she built products at Uber, Nuro and Opower. She was named to the Bloomberg 50 in 2022 and the TIME100 Climate list in 2025.

Nan writes about topics like market shaping for public goods, moral imagination, and San Francisco culture on her website and Substack.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Nan!

Nan’s Picks

The pleasure of finding things out (essay collection)

Richard Feynman

This is a collection of Feynman essays and interviews that are ostensibly about science, but really they’re about much of life – embracing uncertainty, finding the fun and mischief in things, dialing up wonder, exploring big ideas with both intellectual honesty and also a lightness. I forget how I stumbled across these essays originally, but for the past few years I’ve returned to them many times when I’m in need of a mindset ‘tune-up.’ They’ve become sort of medicinal for me – even ~15 minutes with one of them can reliably infuse my brain with a lot more color / texture / energy. (My favorites are: The pleasure of finding things out, There’s plenty of room at the bottom, and What is and what should be the role of scientific culture? – but hop around at your leisure!)

The lives they loved – Regine Weiss Ransohoff (essay)

Martha Ransohoff Adler

I’ll start with the obligatory admission that I am obviously biased here: this is a short piece written by my aunt about my grandmother when she died. Even so! I am pretty sure I’d still love this piece even if I didn’t know Regine. It’s a masterclass in capturing the essence of a person. You can feel how fierce, principled, irreverent, brilliant and witty she was, even in just a few short paragraphs. I think about this piece a lot. It makes me wonder what my (hypothetical) daughter would write about me. It forces an almost semi-regular check-in with myself to see if I’m living in a way that feels directionally aligned with who I hope and aspire to be.

The marriage question: George Eliot’s double life (book)

Clare Carlisle

This book is responsible for my obsession with George Eliot (yes, yes, I too read Middlemarch and loved it, but this took the love to a new level). Among the many reasons to love Eliot is that she made some insanely bold/risky/controversial life choices by today’s standards, let alone for a woman who was born in 1819. And, importantly, things pretty much worked out for her in spite of those choices! This was a woman who was experimenting with and looking closely at relationships through both her own life and the characters she wrote (her ‘double life’ per Carlisle). Furthermore, this book delightfully defies genres – it’s part biography, part philosophical inquiry, part literary criticism. I could go on. But if I had to summarize the net effect of this book on me, it was a massive infusion of courage to not ‘snap-to-grid’ by default for big life choices.

Ted Gioia on Conversations with Tyler (podcast)

The part of the conversation that really stuck with me was the concept of ‘managing your inputs.’ In life we’re evaluated on our output, but that’s downstream of input. “ I know for a fact, I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.” If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output. The ‘zealous management’ of our inputs seems to be among the more important meta-muscles one can build (and one I am still very much working on).

Art is for seeing evil (essay)

A provocative take on the value of art and what it is for, written by the one and only Agnes Callard.

Democracy in America (book)

Alexis de Tocqueville

During undergrad I became very interested in religion as one of the ways humans solve collective action problems – getting large groups of strangers to act in pro-social ways that lead to societal optimal outcomes (I ended up writing my senior thesis on a variant of this idea). Democracy in America was very foundational for me during this period. In de Tocqueville’s view, religion creates voluntary constraints that prevent moral anarchy and political tyranny. “The greatest advantage religions bring is to inspire quite contrary instincts...[to] impose upon each man certain obligations toward the human race or [to] encourage a shared endeavor.” With religiosity precipitously declining in much of the world, I think this is worth a read (or re-read) to understand what role religion played and what gaps we must fill.

John & Paul: A love story in songs (book)

Ian Leslie

I’ll start by saying I’m not a particularly enthusiastic Beatles fan, and still I absolutely tore through this book. To me, this is ultimately a book about a type of relationship that defies all of the ‘normal’ categories. It’s not ‘just’ a friendship, it’s not ‘just’ a creative partnership. In some ways it resembles a marriage, but it’s not quite that either. There’s an intimacy that stems from their shared creative and intellectual endeavor. It’s deeply romantic but not sexual. This book, among other things, made me think about all of the wonderfully rich variants of relationships that exist, and how impoverished our categories for describing them are by comparison. Also, the final two pages brought me to tears (the good kind). I’ve reread them ~a dozen times. (Relatedly: I read this as part of a made-up cluster of books on creative collaborations, including The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty, Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf, and Collaborative Circles by Michael Farrell. Highly recommend!)

Spotlight on Nan’s Work

A few pieces of note from Nan’s work:

• There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems

• How to start an advance market commitment

• Relationship primitives

• On moral imagination

• What virtue is undersupplied today?

• In pursuit of wilder summers

More writing can be found on her website here. You can subscribe to her Substack here and Twitter here.

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

On Self-Respect

Joan Didion | Vogue | 1961

Fast

I should have loved biology

James Somers

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

Edward Jay Epstein | The Atlantic | 1982

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

| 2021

Do Elephants Have Souls?

| 2013

What’s going on here, with this human?

Sweat Bathing and the Body

Mikkel Aaland | 1978

Stay in the Game

Drew Dickson

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Nabeel S. Qureshi is an entrepreneur, writer, and engineer. He's currently the CEO of a stealth startup. Previously, he spent eight years at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer and was a founding employee at GoCardless. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center, where he worked on AI policy alongside Tyler Cowen. He studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford. He writes at nabeelqu.co and Substack, and is @nabeelqu on X.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Nabeel!

Nabeel’s Picks

The Iliad, or the Poem of Force

Simone Weil | December 1940

A masterpiece of literary criticism. I read this essay before I read the Iliad, and it is what made me finally pick up the book. I don’t even fully agree with her arguments in here, but this is the bar of what high quality literary criticism really does, which is get you to understand a great work of art differently and appreciate it more.

Context Is That Which Is Scarce

Tyler Cowen | February 10, 2022

One of Tyler’s mantras I think about constantly, and more important than ever in the AI era. You must think of ‘context’ in the broadest possible sense here.

Shoulda Been Dead

/ This American Life | January 17, 1997

I strongly recommend listening to this and not reading the transcript; Kevin Kelly narrates the story that led to his conversion to Christianity. Probably the most moving and beautiful short essay I’ve ever listened to.

Fake Thinking and Real Thinking

Joe Carlsmith | January 28, 2025

A great essay on the phenomenology of truth-seeking, plus a lot of tricks for actually getting yourself to seek after truth, very much in the rationalist tradition.

The Scaling Hypothesis

gwern | May 28, 2020

I was torn between this or Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson”, but if I were to tell somebody from the past the one key historical fact they needed to understand about the 2020s, it would be the one laid out in this essay.

Be Specific

Eliezer Yudkowsky | April 3, 2012

One of the most important cognitive skills. This essay in particular captures what I like so much about the rationalist movement – the earnest attempt at understanding the truth.

The Lives of Animals (Tanner Lecture)

JM Coetzee | October 15, 1997

A beautiful example of philosophical fiction, a provocative lecture, and also a great example of how art and morals can intersect.

Spotlight on Nabeel’s Work

A few things I’ve written that people seem to like:

How To Understand Things — On intelligence as a virtue rather than a fixed trait. The smartest people I know aren’t necessarily the fastest thinkers; they’re the ones who refuse to accept answers they don’t actually understand.

Reflections on Palantir — After eight years, I tried to explain what the company actually is and why it produces so many founders. This got more attention than I expected.

On Reading Proust — Why In Search of Lost Time is now my favorite novel, and why it’s not as intimidating as it seems.

Principles — A running list of things I try to keep in mind. “Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension.”

I was also recently a guest on Dialectic, a podcast with .

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories’ 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech, which now supports 15 languages. It’s been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Our curator today is Sari Azout (@sariazout). Sari is the founder of Sublime, an inspiration tool used by thousands of thinkers and creatives to collect ideas. cultivate taste, and make work that feels distinctly human in an age of AI. She also writes a Substack newsletter, where she reaches 70,000+ readers with musings on tech, culture, creativity, and building thoughtfully in these strange times.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Sari!

Sari’s Picks

Pre, Mid, Post-Training Way of Life

I had to read this essay several times to understand it, but wow, Tina is such a gifted writer. She manages to do several things in this piece: explain how modern AI training works, use that as a metaphor for different kinds of human minds, and turn it into a spiritual question about what we’re optimizing our lives for. Highly recommend.

Mother

A personal reflection on the author’s relationship with his mother that brought me to tears, This quote stopped me in my tracks: “It is easier to survive a category five hurricane than it is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. My mother was defeated by Wednesdays.”

I’ve had several disagreements with friends about where you stand on things. Where do you…stand?

Nick Cave

Filed under things I wish I wrote. I am comfortable with doubt and am constitutionally resistant to moral certainty, herd mentality and dogma. I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts – I do not believe that silence is violence, complicity, or a lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the preferred option when one does not know what they are talking about, or is doubtful, or conflicted – which, for me, is most of the time.

Backseat software

Mike Swanson

If you’re trying to build something good today, this essay is a powerful defense on intuition, and touches on what happens when optimization eats vision and experimentation becomes the primary decision making tool. Reminds me of The Score by C. Thi Nguyen, the best things are impossible to fully represent in a graph.

The Third Chair

Just trust me. It’s short (400 words) and will give you goosebumps.

Face it: You’re a crazy person

If I ruled the world, I would make this required reading in high school.

The proposal letter Steve Albini sent to Nirvana

Steve Albini

I love a good letter not intended to be read by a wider audience, and this one is a masterclass in creative integrity.

Spotlight on Sari’s Work

A few pieces of note from Sari’s work:

• Conversations on AI x Creativity. Ten in-depth conversations exploring how artificial intelligence is changing and challenging creative work, including , , , and .

• A very human vision for going all in on AI. My conversation with David Pierce, Editor at Large at The Verge.

• Becoming unLLMable. My keynote talk at the Sana AI Summit in Stockholm.

• Letter to a friend starting something new. If you are thinking of leaving your job to start a company or passion project, this letter is for you too.

• The Deadline Candle. A great gift for the people in your life that need a reminder of how little time we have on this rock.

You can subscribe to her Substack here and try Sublime here.

“Brought to you by”… Sublime!

Normally we use this section to promote our team’s apps, Matter and Halo, but sometimes we use it to promote other products we like, just cuz. :)

Since today’s curator makes a product of her own, it feels only right to give the “sponsorship” (not paid) in today’s issue to Sublime, one of our favorite tools.

Built for minds that wander and wonder, Sublime is a personal knowledge tool that turns your scattered inspirations into a living library you'll actually return to. Save anything that makes you go “whoa” and watch connections emerge across your growing collection.

Our curator today is Rohit Krishnan (@krishnanrohit). Rohit is CPO of Bodo and writes Strange Loop Canon, his Substack with 24,000+ subscribers, where he publishes deeply researched, playfully written essays on AI, organizations, talent, and the strange ways ideas compound across disciplines. He also wrote Building God: Demystifying AI for Decision Makers, a book that cuts through the hype to explain what AI actually is and where it's going.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Rohit!

Rohit’s Picks

Gödel Escher Bach

Douglas R. Hofstadter | 1979

This is the book that more than any other taught me what a nonfiction book could be! I read it first in college, and two decades later I still think about this book regularly. I named my blog after it. The use of self-reference and recursion as having deep commonalities across mathematics, music and art fundamentally changed my views in ways that aren’t easily describable, because I don’t know what before-me was like anymore. I still do not understand all of the book either, if I’m being frank, but that almost doesn’t matter. Once you read it, you cannot help but emerge changed.

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse | 1943

There are novels that discuss ideas, novels that discuss academia, and novels that discuss philosophy. Usually these are somewhat incompatible, or at least incongruous when you put it together. Hesse manages to do the impossible in this book. This is the best encapsulation of what it might mean to live in an ivory tower, to contemplate ideas and their interrelationships and find the beauty therein, that I’ve read. Herman Hesse is of course a master, which is why the very concept of this game, this eponymous game, that is barely described but you feel like you can just see it, it gets inside you and doesn’t let go easily.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Albert Hirschman | 1970

I use this framework regularly to understand the world. More than any other I can think of, actually. Its simplicity is a virtue, because once you read it it’s hard to think of a world where this didn’t exist. When things get bad, people leave (Exit), or they try to change things (Voice), or stick around out of attachment (Loyalty). The balance between these describes a system. Any system. Every system! From politics to work to relationships. A seminal work.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Jorge Luis Borges | 1940

Borges is a highly rated, and still criminally underrated, author, whose work is even more important now in the age of LLMs. This is a canonical piece I read during a phase when I was jumping off of magical realism. I read it as a fugue. A blend of story, philosophy, and imagination. Here Uqbar is a forgotten land, which refers to Tlon. Tlon is the idealist world, an imaginary planet, governed by subjective idealism. There are no nouns, language is based on adjectives, and objects are brought into being through hope. (You can see where the post magical realism aspects fit). Which makes it a spectacular meditation on ideas-as-reality, and perhaps the best way I’ve found to think about the inner latent space inside LLMs.

The Sciences of the Artificial

Herbert Simon | 1969

A brilliant work by Herbert Simon. He makes a forceful case that manmade objects, artificial ones, can be studied with the same rigour as natural phenomena. I love it because it lightens the boundary between manmade and natural, and makes that membrane porous. It’s also the first glimpse into the world of complexity, later taken up by the likes of Santa Fe Institute, and makes this seemingly “soft” art, about design or understanding, into something harder.

The Use of Knowledge in Society

F. A. Hayek | 1945

Hayek’s book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand markets, or indeed the exceptionally complex world we inhabit. There are a large number of times when it feels like if only we had all the right information, if only we knew all the ways of doing something, we could figure out the right logical thing to do. But we can’t! The very importance of prices is that they embed all manner of local information that is combined, analysed, synthesised, and coalesced into a signal that we all know how to use. It’s distilled knowledge. It’s marvelous! And despite being the cornerstone of modern capitalism, somehow still underrrated.

Discworld (all of it)!

Terry Pratchett | 1983–2015

Okay, this is going to be hard to explain. On the surface, this is a series that’s about a fictional world that is flat (a disc), which has wizards and witches and vampires, extremely whimsical and silly and funny. Really really funny. But underneath, it contains some of the most astute observations about the human condition I’ve read. Vetinari, Weatherwax, and Vimes are some of the most fully formed, poignant, hilarious characters to be created in literature. And each of them, and many more, gets a full arc across multiple books.

Sir Terry deals with philosophy, technology transforming society, government systems, religion, everything that makes up life … Making Money itself would help a large number of economics commentators today. I have an enormous soft spot for those authors who can discuss complex themes but can still be funny. It’s perhaps that old notion about “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backward and in high heels”, but with literature.

The Culture Novels

Iain M Banks | 1987–2012

A weird part of living so close to talk about AGI is that it’s incredibly difficult to discuss what the future is going to be like without it sounding like magic or making it dystopian. Well, Banks has crafted the single best future world that is incomprehensibly large, logically coherent, insanely ambitious, and utopian, but with human-scale struggles, that I have ever read. I truly don’t grasp how he wrote these books. It is impossible to describe, because I don’t even think they are just novels. I read them like wikipedia entries about a weird future time that I am glimpsing through a somewhat foggy mirror. If literature is meant to expand one’s horizons and think better then there is nothing better for you to read. I recommend starting with Player of Games, as the most “normal” of these, or Excession. But go in any order you like, they will expand your world.

The Peripheral

William Gibson | 2014

Science fiction novels about the apocalypse or about the post apocalypse can get quite boring. Once you’ve read a couple, especially if you’ve seen a movie in the last few decades, the beats are quite predictable. Which is why I love this so much. William Gibson wrote the most fresh, original and interesting take on an apocalypse that I’ve read recently. It is both a page turner and it is exceptionally well thought out, a rare combination. It also works as a commentary on the present by presenting both the near future and the far future and also as a commentary on the development of technology. I walked around for a while after first reading it thinking damn, Gibson has solved science fiction, which is a weird sentence but you’ll see what I mean when you read it. It shuts down the genre. It’s also the one of the only real scifi novel of recent years that remains brilliant despite the advent of AI. There’s even a pretty good TV show.

How Life Works

Philip Ball | 2023

Most origin-of-life writing handwaves at “complexity”. As much as I’m a fan, I agree that it’s really difficult to get beyond the initial ‘wow’ and to actually learn what to do or what to predict with complex systems. And the most complex of these, beyond economies or companies, is biology. Philip Ball, who used to be the editor of Nature and has written some spectacular books, looks at this world here, and shows how incredibly complex biology actually is, across all scales.

He gives a brilliant and complex and frankly the best account I’ve read of how life came to be and why it works. And in doing so he shows what’s missing with the metaphors we use, where we think of DNA as a blueprint or biological systems as akin to mechanical devices. It’s therefore one of the best arguments against reductionism I’ve read, showing even single cells have “agency” of some sort, and it makes the case for the sheer internal complexity we’d have to confront were we to eventually reach human emulation in a non-biological substrate.

Anathem

Neal Stephenson | 2008

Neal Stephenson had to make the list, the only question was which book. I chose Anathem here in the end because it’s essentially worldbuilding as an argument. It’s (in my mind) a cousin of The Glass Bead Game, another monastery like community, where intellectuals are isolated and pursue their own interests. But while Knecht looks at the outside world through his friends, Stephenson brings in an extraterrestrial conflict. It’s difficult to describe, but is an everything-novel, where it deals with everything. What more could you ask for!

Spotlight on Rohit’s Work

I write essays that I would want to read, and as the lists above show my interests revolve around finding ways to understand things - which means it’s a combination of either new research or experiments I did or observations of the world that let me reframe my understanding somehow. A few examples I like:

• What Would a World With AGI Look Like? — Works through the GPU, energy, and labor requirements of AGI and arrives at numbers that would demand rewiring the entire semiconductor and power industries. A useful antidote to hand-wavy AGI takes.

• Life in India Is a Series of Bilateral Negotiations — A travelogue that turns into a Coase theorem explainer. Marvels at India’s infrastructure glow-up while diagnosing what still holds it back: a culture where every interaction — merging lanes, skipping a queue — is a one-on-one negotiation rather than a shared norm.

• Seeing Like a Network — A theory of why everything feels broken. Network densification — not any particular platform or politician — is the root cause of polarization and institutional distrust. The flight to Discord and dumb phones is a healthy instinct toward sparser networks.

• Will Money Still Exist in the Agentic Economy? — Turns the “Coasean singularity” thesis into a testable claim. LLM agents run through barter scenarios of increasing complexity don’t develop money organically — unlike humans, they never convert IOUs into a shared numeraire.

• Hierarchical Growth Trade-Offs — On why large organizations calcify. Hierarchy is a rational response to information overload, and breaking it requires increasing communication bandwidth — not just flattening org charts.

Strange Loop Canon

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein

By Rohit Krishnan

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories' 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultra-realistic text to speech, which now supports 15 languages. It's been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Interested in switching from Pocket or another read-later app? Matter is offering 50% off your first year — just email hello@getmatter.com to claim it.

Our curator today is Jasmine Sun (@jasminewsun). Jasmine is an independent writer who publishes a Substack newsletter on AI and Silicon Valley culture — a project she calls an "anthropology of disruption." She spends her time interviewing AI researchers, eavesdropping at parties, and chronicling how frontier tech percolates across cultures and disciplines. Her recent piece on the Chinese peptides trend in Silicon Valley was the cover story of the New York Times Sunday Business edition. She lives in sunny San Francisco.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Jasmine!

Jasmine’s Picks

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card | 1985

My intellectual coming-of-age begins with Ender’s Game, a book that I read once a year, every year, from ages 10 to 20. It’s about the way technology is magical & the way it creates moral distance, about how an idealistic kid can change the world yet still end up exploited by systems much larger than them.

Young Money

| 2014

Reading this book my freshman year of college (and meeting Kevin after) single-handedly persuaded me not to go into finance, and to consider a career in journalism instead. It also expanded my view of what journalism could be: not a detached view-from-nowhere, but getting to know an industry by immersing oneself in its social world.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Fred Turner | 2006

I wish modern Silicon Valley spent more time learning its lineage. This is the history of how Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog bridged the hippies and the hackers, giving rise to a particular intellectual-philosophical worldview that informs many tech daydreams to this day. It is also secondarily a story about how information is the most important technology of all.

The Charisma of Leaders

Mills Baker | 2013

What makes a compelling founder, president, or leader? By looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs, Mills argues that it’s not any special talent, but rather the “unity of conscience and will” — the “unreasonable man” who seems to live fully in accordance with himself, free from the pedestrian anxieties that plague us mere mortals.

Sontag

Benjamin Moser | 2019

If Jobs is tech’s favorite unreasonable man, Susan Sontag is literature’s unreasonable woman par excellence. In this biography of Sontag as both woman and writer, Moser reveals that she was petty, cruel, aloof, and insecure; image-obsessed and bedeviled by her own relentless high standards. I read it and felt somehow far less alone.

For Argument’s Sake

Becca Rothfeld | 2022

I collect debate essays: Sally Rooney’s, Ben Lerner’s, and this by Becca Rothfeld. They’re all fantastic, but in the end I chose this. It’s easy to list all the ways that competitive debate makes you worse, but Rothfeld’s answers the hard question: why people do it anyway. It was like the closest thing to intellectual meritocracy in an irrational world, and offered the poetic justice of “slashing at a stupid argument until it bled to death at my feet.”

The Case for Software Criticism

Sheon Han | 2023

By this point I’d moved on from the intellectual sandbox of a debate round to writing for the real world. Here, Sheon makes the case for the practice of “software criticism”: applying the rigor and attention devoted to other fine art forms to software — giving us the precise, well-reasoned, and impassioned language to describe why some tech products feel good and others rot our brains. If words matter, can they even shape our tech?

The Great A.I. Awakening

| 2016

I discovered this piece too late—not until last year—but it is the pinnacle of what I think technology journalism can be. It is equal parts futuristic and funny, rigorous and dramatized. It is a superhero story—a tiny Google team’s triumph over vast linguistic barriers!—grounded in a messy real-world context of technical and organizational progress. I keep a printout on my desk to refer to when I write.

Working

Robert A. Caro | 2019

The most motivating thing to read for any writer refining their craft. “If you do everything, you’ll win.”

Spotlight on Jasmine’s Work

A few pieces of note from Jasmine’s archive:

• Chinese Peptides Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World — Jasmine’s first feature for the New York Times, and it landed the cover of the Sunday Business edition. A deep look at how unregulated peptides sourced from China have become the latest obsession in tech’s wellness scene.

• America Against China Against America — A sprawling, personal essay that weaves her grandparents’ journey from Indonesia to Fudan University into a broader reckoning with Chinese hypermodernity and what it means for American tech ambition. It sparked podcast appearances on Sinica and elsewhere.

• My Claude Code Psychosis — A self-aware and very funny account of what happens when a self-described nontechnical writer discovers AI coding tools. Jasmine got so deep into building apps with Claude Code that she delayed writing the piece about it by a week.

You can subscribe to her Substack at jasmi.news.

Brought to you by…

Today’s issue is brought to you by Matter.

Matter is the modern read-later app for serious readers. Since Pocket shut down last fall, tens of thousands of readers have made Matter their new home.

Designed for Apple, Matter has earned multiple App of the Day honors and won MacStories' 2025 Feature of the Year for its ultrarealistic text-to-speech. It's been recommended by Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison, the Acquired Podcast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Interested in switching from Pocket or another read-later app? Matter is offering 50% off your first year — just email hello@getmatter.com to claim it.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Ava.

Ava's Picks

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

My favorite short story ever. I won't spoil it other than to say that the premise is two couples discussing what it really means to love someone. I think about this story all the time.

"I Don't Think Character Exists Anymore" by Alexandra Schwartz

An interview with Rachel Cusk that I'm obsessed with.

Reader, I Married Him by Judith Thurman

An excellent piece on the Bronte siblings.

So you wanna de-bog yourself by Adam Mastroianni

An amazing Substack piece on the reasons why people get unstuck and how they can get unstuck.

The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

The ultimate down bad poem.

Rachel Rumi's TikToks

I'm really into this woman who goes by Rachel Rumi on TikTok and has the most incredible manner.

Cheryl Strayed's The Truth That Lives There

This is the only thing anyone who is contemplating a breakup ever needs to read.

This Female Consciousness: On Chris Kraus by Leslie Jamison

A writer I love writing about another writer I love.

Spotlight on Ava's Work

If you're new to Ava's work, start with these:

• the friendship theory of everything

• how to avoid half-heartedness

• effort

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Henrik.

Henrik's Picks

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor

One of the great intellectual love stories is that between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, the married woman Mill corresponded with for twenty years, ascribed his best ideas to, and married in old age. Not to give away too much: but their end is the kind of stuff that practices your tear canal.

A Child's Plaything

Toby Ord's micro essay, 114 words long, manages to say more interesting things than most writers do in a full year's worth of blog posts.

The Understory

An essay that centers on an excursion in the woods that Robert Macfarlane takes with the fungal researcher Merlin Sheldrake. Beautiful nature writing coupled with interesting discussions about the interrelations in the forest and the limitations in trying to reduce those relationships to the political categories of human beings—and much more.

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Ingmar Bergman's workbooks

The film director Ingmar Bergman kept a sprawling workbook for more than 30 years of his life. There he would riff in a totally unhinged and uncensored way to lure out images from himself. When it was published in Swedish a few years ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote this insightful introduction. The workbooks have sadly not been translated into English yet, but the introduction has.

Manufacturing Bliss

This is my favorite recent piece. After I listened to it, I went to put our six-year-old to sleep and while laying there, I tried what Nadia Asparouhova covers in the piece and after 40 minutes had one of the most intense feelings of bliss I've ever experienced. Quite surreal.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect

Time moves at a different rate online. If I read a blog post from 2010, it feels like climbing down into a prehistoric crypt. Especially when, as in this case, it is only preserved as a snapshot on the internet archive. But this one, by Hang, is worth the climb to get a feel for the commentary around social networks from the era when they first took shape. This one is deeply insightful about the dynamics of social groups, how they degrade with scale, and what to do about it.

Monkey and Bear

While technically a piece of harp music, this is one of the better lyrical essays of the 2000s. Reading the lyrics to songs is rarely a pleasant experience, but in Joanna Newsom's case, the words have rich—and deeply layered—meaning. On agency, autonomy, and false peddlers of freedom.

Spotlight on Henrik's Work

Henrik has written multiple Staff Picks and fan favorites, including:

• Childhoods of exceptional people

• A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

• First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us

• Looking for Alice

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Adam.

Adam's Picks

Slime Mold Time Mold, "The Scientific Virtues"

This piece by a pseudonymous collective of mad scientists is required reading for anyone who wants to discover truths about the world. "The scientific virtues are: Stupidity, Arrogance, Laziness, Carefreeness, Beauty, Rebellion, Humor."

"Three Kingdoms"

I used to be a little confused when people said that they learned how to be a better person from watching movies and reading books. I only understood after I accidentally got addicted to this 95-episode TV adaptation of a 14th-century novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is itself a dramatization of the Three Kingdoms Era of Chinese history (220-280 AD). About every 15 minutes, somebody has to make a life-altering decision: do I follow my evil king into battle, or do I break my oath of loyalty? Do I invite my defeated enemies to join me, or do I wipe them out to avoid future threats? Do I listen to my trusted advisors, or do I follow my gut? Even though the context and the stakes are different from our own (I don't often lead 100,000 soldiers), it's a remarkably relevant tutorial on living virtuously during tumultuous times.

Ada Palmer, "On Progress and Historical Change"

Where is history going and how does it get there? Palmer shows that, although the great forces of history are indeed impossible to overcome, the outcomes are never set, and the choices of individuals––however small they may be!––make all the difference. I get something new every time I re-read this essay, though it still brings me to tears every time.

Visakan Veerasamy, "Are You Serious?"

Visa is the sage of the internet era. His best work is usually in tweets, but this is a rare essay that succeeds at distilling some of his thinking. What does it look like to be serious about something? One answer: when your wife dies because it took too long to get her to the hospital, you spend the rest of your life hewing a path through the mountains by hand.

Reply All, "The Case of the Missing Hit"

Sadly now defunct, Reply All was once a cross between This American Life and Radiolab, but less ambient and plodding than its hoity-toity older siblings. This was their best work, a caper about a guy who has a perfect memory of a song he heard in the 90s but now can't find it anywhere.

Idle Words, "No Evidence of Disease"

I write blog posts for a living, so it's a thrill to see someone reach the peak of the art form. This story, a haunting, personal tale with a sick twist at the end, could not exist in any other format.

Heavyweight

A deadpan Canadian tries to help people resolve something from their past, usually causing the listener (me) to get teary-eyed in the process. It's hard to pick just one episode, but highlights are: "Gregor," where a guy accuses Moby of stealing his CDs, "Bobby," where the show's sound engineer explains how he helped create the most reviled commercial of all time, and "Marchel," about a guy who ruined a movie.

3 Idiots

Something's rotten in higher education, and this Bollywood movie is the best example of what it is and how to fix it.

The Agency Sequence: The Most Precious Resource Is Agency, How To Be More Agentic, Things You're Allowed to Do

The internet has made many more types of life possible, trapping us in a paradox of choice: when you can do anything, how do you, uh, do anything? These answers were all written by different people at different times, but they hang together weirdly well.

Spotlight On Adam's Work

If you liked these links, you'll probably like these two blog posts from Adam:

1. Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

2. So you wanna de-bog yourself

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Sam.

Sam’s Picks

Kevin Simler, “Ads Don’t Work That Way”

When Corona beer advertises how laid back people who drink it are, it isn’t trying to convince you that drinking it will make you feel laid back. Instead, Kevin Simler says, it’s trying to create “common knowledge” that will make other people view you as laid back when they see you with it—and not, say, an All-American patriot, or a knowledgeable beer connoisseur (which you might drink something else to signal). Simler’s model makes sense of how a lot of ads are written, and of why they are where they are. The ones that run on public billboards, instead of being targeted to us through our phone screens, are often out there so that you know the rest of the world knows the kind of person who drinks Corona.

Robert Wiblin, “What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong”

Putting rubbish into a landfill is much better for the world than people think. Landfills are cheap, not too bad for the environment because—in the developed world—they’re lined with plastic, and they prevent trash from ending up in the ocean, which a lot of people worry about. Even if you’d recycle your trash instead, that can be so energy-intensive that it could be more wasteful and bad for the environment than just sending it to a landfill.

Jack Devanney, “The Two Lies that Killed Nuclear Power”

Jack Devanney is an engineer interested in why nuclear energy has been a flop. The answer, he says, is that we’ve built in neverending cost rises to nuclear power by demanding that any and all productivity gains have to go straight into stricter and stricter safety controls. But that approach stems from one of the “big lies” he writes about: the misconception that releases of radioactive materials are much more deadly than experience shows they really are.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Albion’s Seed”

The best book review I’ve ever read, that mainly takes a few dozen of the most interesting facts from the book it’s about and lists them. Did you know that the American Quakers introduced laws prohibiting people from mocking other religions? Or that, as well as the famous “scarlet A” for adultery, “Puritans could be forced to wear a B for blasphemy, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, and so on”? I wish all book reviews were like this.

Jeffrey Friedman, “A crisis of politics, not economics”

This article by the late Jeffrey Friedman completely overturned my view of the financial crisis, and plausibly attributes it to the incredibly unfortunate interaction of well-meaning regulations intended to encourage prudence by banks. If this is correct, it is extremely challenging for how we think about financial regulation and regulation more generally, because it suggests that sophisticated interventions intended to reduce risk can backfire with the opposite effect, in this case catastrophically.

Anton Howes, “How the Dutch Did it Better”

Anton Howes’s economic history investigates the inventors and inventions that made the Industrial Revolution happen. His Substack is one of the best around. He argues that an “improving mindset” led to a flowering of innovation and entrepreneurship across a huge number of domains—not just things like steam power and steel, but also watches and musical instruments. If true, it is one of the most important claims imaginable, because it suggests that culture is the underlying variable that made the modern world. This post looks at some of the factors that led to the Dutch Golden Age, the time and place where modern capitalism first began to take shape.

Saloni Dattani, Siddhartha Haria & Rachel Glennerster, “Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner”

From Works in Progress, a long essay on the development of the malaria vaccine. The authors track how we got to a working malaria vaccine—detailing things like the invention of a machine for mass decapitation of mosquitos (to harvest malaria from their salivary glands), through the 23 years of trials that were often delayed because of a lack of funding, to where we are today: rolling out tens of millions of doses of a vaccine that reduces child mortality from the disease by more than half. They highlight how “advance market commitments” could encourage the development of new vaccines for other diseases, by getting governments and NGOs to pledge to buy tens of millions of doses of treatments that don’t yet exist—if someone can create one that works.

Ramsi Woodcock, “Yet Another Amazon Antitrust Paradox”

Amazon and other large tech platforms are sometimes accused of being too closed and giving unfair preference to certain products (like their own). But from a consumer perspective Amazon might be too open. While platforms’ openness allows them to grow to a gigantic size, it can come at a big cost, as anyone who uses Amazon will know. The site is full of junk products from fake brands, with reviews you can’t trust. The curation that Amazon does, like other retailers, is a natural response to the abundance of choice that the open market offers, and naturally makes them smaller as well. The “paradox” is that measures designed to make Amazon and other platforms more open and neutral might actually reinforce their monopoly positions, by keeping them as large as possible, even if they are worse to use.

Dynomight, “Historical analogies for large language models”

LLMs will do to human writers what freezers did to the ice trade. No, actually—what tractors did for farmers, or maybe what calculators did for accountants. Or how about what mass production did to hand-made goods? Dynomight writes about the many historical analogies we have to choose from, which are so varied that you might end up concluding that such analogising isn’t very useful to begin with.

Spotlight on Sam’s Work

Subscribe to Works in Progress, a magazine publishing short essays showcasing new and underrated ideas to improve the world.

And be sure to read Sam’s classic essay The Housing Theory of Everything.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Steph.

Steph's Picks

I love the Internet. Hopefully if you're reading this, you do too.

And since this newsletter is called, "words that matter", I wanted to share the many different levels of information that the Internet allows us to read, hear, ogle over, dispute, share, and more – starting with 1 word all the way up to nearly a billion – and maybe even the unsolvable?

1 word: an untranslatable word

Without the Internet, most of us would have no idea what unique ideas lie in the soundbites of other languages. Lucky for us, words like ikigai, schadenfreude, and ubuntu now have a ring of familiarity. One of my favorite untranslatables? Ichi-go ichi-e, meaning "one time, one meeting". Applying to this very moment, whether or not this is the first time you are reading this term on digital paper, you will never experience it quite like this again; at this exact time, in this exact place, with the exact psychology you have now.

10 words: a digit

Sometimes a single statistic means so much more than meets the eye. And despite our human brains not being well equipped to digest exponentials, some people spot these trends earlier than others, like Arthur C Clarke predicting remote work on the shores of Bali way back in... 1964! Some of my favorite newsletters for catching these exponentials are Chartr, Numlock, and Exponential View.

100 words: a tweet

This one, and its definition of magic, continues to live rent-free in my brain. And I feel like this challenge of pushing yourself to be as much a magician in your own right – pushing past the obvious creativity on the surface – is all the more relevant in the era of AI. Step 1 to getting there? Surround yourself with other "magicians", like Nicholas Britell, who composed the impeccable Succession theme song and treated us to this incredible interview breaking down its magic.

690 words: a dictionary upgrade

We often think of dictionaries as static corpuses, but just like the rest of society, our shared vocabulary is constantly shifting. In September, for example, Merriam Webster added 690 words to the dictionary, including "rizz", "bussin'", and "goated".

1,000 words: a deck

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words and this deck by Kevin Kwok on Figma might be my favorite deck on the internet. It's well-crafted on a thematic and aesthetic level, but the content is also excellent, outlining the playbook behind Figma's strategic design.

10,000 words: a moving infographic

One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that anyone can share their creations with the world. This animated infographic showing the changes in world population from 10,000 BCE to now is a perfect example of the type of content that would never exist if not for the internet.

100,000 words: a book

There are many great books, but Dataclysm by Christian Rudder is one that I keep coming back to. It's a fascinating look at what data from dating sites like OkCupid can tell us about human behavior.

1,000,000+ words: a subreddit

The r/MapPorn subreddit is a treasure trove of fascinating maps and data visualizations. It's one of my favorite corners of the internet for discovering new perspectives on the world.

860,341,500 words: a lifetime

Buster Benson's "Life in Weeks" is a powerful visualization of a human lifespan. It puts into perspective just how much time we have – and how much we've already spent.

Infinity words: humanity's unsolved problems

And finally, at the far end of the spectrum, there are the unsolved problems of humanity. These lists on Wikipedia span mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and more – reminding us that for all the knowledge the internet contains, there's still so much we don't know.

Spotlight on Steph's Work

Steph has built an impressive portfolio of products and content. Check out Doing Content Right for her course on building an audience, or Internet Pipes for her database of online tools and resources.