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

2 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.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Leslie.

Leslie’s Picks

Luminous Writing

Jennifer Senior, “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind”

Probably the single best essay I’ve ever read.

Cynthia Zarin, “An Enlarged Heart”

An early-2000s sensibility for sure, but the immediacy and intimacy of the prose cannot be beat. I think the tone of my essay about my grandmother was an unconscious homage to Zarin’s piece.

Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses”

My current favorite poem.

Work and Management Tips

Roger Martin, “A Plan is Not a Strategy”

Excellent. “Not knowing for sure isn’t bad management. It’s great leadership.”

Anil Dash on Making Better Documents

On the Craft of Writing

David Grann on craft wisdom and breaking into narrative nonfiction

The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z tells you how to find stories and write them really well.

Two very different podcasts featuring great writers talking about writing:

Scriptnotes
Screenwriters Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) and John August (The Nines, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) talk about “screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.”

Ursa Short Fiction Podcast
Authors Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Dawnie Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev) select a short story that is read aloud one week, and the next week, they talk to the author.

On Ways of Seeing

Julia Skinner, “What it’s like to be a food writer when you can taste everything you see”

On synesthesia.

Theresa Vargas, “The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images: the alt text descriptions”

A great look into the language behind the images.

How a Rare Portrait of an Enslaved Child Arrived at the Met

This 10-minute video is a fascinating art detective story.

What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed

This interactive re-creation of the Greenwood district of Tulsa before the Race Massacre is emotionally powerful and also has great research chops. I am a native Tulsan but never learned about this horror in school.

Nice Quick Hits

Mandy Brown, “A Unified Theory of F**ks”

Silly and thought-provoking at the same time.

A Manifesto By

So many good thoughts in here by various activists and creatives, from Ai Wei Wei to Chez Panisse. I like Sir John Hegarty’s.

Ram Dass on Self-Judgement

I return to the first paragraph on a regular basis.

Spotlight on Leslie’s Work

Leslie has produced three seminal books about the history of technology and Silicon Valley:

• Make Something Wonderful — A curated collection of Steve Jobs’s speeches, interviews, and correspondence, in which Jobs shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his return to the company that started it all.

• Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age — “A landmark event.” –Eric Schmidt

• The Man Behind the Microchip — “Required reading for today’s entrepreneurs and executives.” –The Washington Post

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Shreeda.

Shreeda's Picks

On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers

Ever wonder what your therapist is thinking about during your sessions? A rare, honest take from the shrink's point of view. Rogers advocates for an approach to therapy that rivals the more popular psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioral frameworks. I've not read anything else on empathy that is more accurate, incisive, or challenging.

Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock by Venkatesh Rao

Don't let the title fool you. This article did not trigger my pandemic PTSD and instead helped me sense-make how the pandemic triggered broader cultural shifts. "Pandemic time can be understood as a liminal passage between the end of the industrial era and the beginning of the digital era."

Why do new cars look like this? by Blackbird Spyplane

What's up with the matte-yet-glossy, putty-like, almost-pastel-but-not-quite colors of new cars? Just scroll to the photos in this article and you'll immediately recognize what I mean. The power couple that writes this fashion newsletter takes on all sorts of aesthetic trends.

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

Relevant for anyone who dares to build anything that is inhabited by those who are alive. If you're like me, you'll read this book and pray that someday you build something, someday, that Christopher Alexander would be proud of.

Good Cogs and Their Tools by Brie Wolfson

"Good cogs get their performance reviews in on time. They never complain about company policy. They keep their trackers up to date and are always on time for meetings."

A cautionary tale for scaling orgs and a normie-friendly version of something like The Gervais Principle — one you might even be able to reference in a company Slack message when advocating for a good culture.

Maps of Meaning (2017) by Jordan B. Peterson

If you give anything by Peterson a chance, let it be Maps of Meaning. Not his culture war podcasts. Not his tweets. It's basically Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and The Other Greats synthesized into a single lecture series.

Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace

Probably the only story I've read that I felt genuinely might merit a trigger warning. Genuinely shocking, painfully genius. You don't have to read Infinite Jest to appreciate the magic (read: madness) of DFW. You just have to read one of his short stories. Maybe this one. (TW: mental health, suicide).

Protocols Don't Build Pyramids by Drew Austin

Traffic jams and other urban problems are not only systemic. They are protocol problems. "To claim that the built environment is full of infrastructurally constrained coordination problems is another way of saying that cities have protocol problems."

Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies by Brian Potter

Inspired by Ise Jingu, a Japanese shrine that is torn down and rebuilt every 20 years, Potter contends with the importance of preserving process knowledge.

Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty (Zero-knowledge Proofs)

Zkps blow my mind. They're some of the closest technology I've seen to magic. A zero-knowledge proof "is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, while avoiding conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of the statement's truth."

Ignorance, a skilled practice by Sarah Perry

The essay that gave me permission to ignore things. Ignorance is not only bliss; it's sometimes a virtue.

Spotlight on Shreeda's Work

Shreeda has been on a tear with Meridian Magazine. She has recently written illuminating and widely-shared profiles of Dwarkesh Patel, Byrne Hobart, and Emmett Shear.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Julian.

Julian's Picks

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce (1983)

Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, focuses on Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It highlights the powerful combination of Midwest earnestness and Bay Area ambition.

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved (1970)

The freakish outlier of my picks. This publication introduced gonzo journalism, a new writing style. I have a soft spot for Hunter S. Thompson. His extreme exaggeration of events somehow reaches a greater truth.

Levels: A Cultural Anomaly (2021)

I've seen over a thousand startups launch through ODF. Levels has a unique culture. Do you know another startup that records every internal meeting (including 1:1s) for all teammates to watch? How about a company that publishes all their year-old investor updates and weekly all hands sessions? The article delves into the company's operations.

Silicon Valley Wants Dogs to Live Longer So Humans Can, Too (2021)

Ashlee Vance wrote the celebrated first biography of Elon. In this article for Wired, he examines Celine Halioua's life extension efforts at her company Loyal. Celine is one of the most formidable founders I know. She's a first-time founder in a highly-regulated field and no obstacle seems to get in her way. Loyal recently received the FDA's first-ever acceptance that a drug can be developed and approved to extend lifespan. This achievement has been described as "the most important milestone in the history of longevity biotech."

The anti-VC success story: Chess.com (Podcast)

I don't know what I like more about this podcast, the way Erik (Chess.com founder) shares his story of an earnest desire to build something that people love and do it his own way or the fact that Harry (VC) seems incredulous half the time during the interview. I expect we'll see more successes like Chess.com in the years ahead and the world will benefit from founders carving alternative paths.

193 Arnold Schwarzenegger — Arnold's First Autobiography — Founders Podcast (2020)

I've saved the best for last. This is perhaps the most consequential piece of media in my life. I listened to this at least once a week while on long runs for months during a challenging period in my life. Many impactful lessons and mental models. One relevant lesson is Arnold recounting how many at the gym looked like they hated being there and were whining about working out. His perspective was different: "all I would say is that I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal."

Spotlight on Julian's Work

ODF is a program for people exploring starting startups. It helps them find the missing pieces: co-founders, ideas, and customers.

The program has been running for 5 years and 20 cohorts. Over 1,000 ODF startups have launched including AtoB, Pave, Finch, Contra, and Cal.com.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Erik.

Erik's Picks

Paper Tigers

Wes Yang is one of the great chroniclers of how everything has changed in the past decade. This piece is before all that. It's about him reconciling own alienation from his culture, and inquiring whether to adjust himself to the world or adjust the world to him.

Hunter S. Thompson's Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life

Hunter S. Thompson tells a friend to make sure that whatever path he chooses, it is his own.

"Circling" and nerd society

Curtis Yarvin is not known for his relationship advice, similar to how Ayn Rand is not known for writing love stories. But Atlas Shrugged is an underrated love story, and Curtis Yarvin gives underrated relationship advice.

The Opposite of Loneliness

Marina Keegan died in a tragic accident after penning this. I had a friend who also died our senior years of college who made me feel the opposite of loneliness. Her family created a great foundation in her name dedicated to suicide prevention training and funding depression research.

Wait for it, from Hamilton

"Death doesn't discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
And we keep living anyway
We rise and we fall and we break
And we make our mistakes
And if there's a reason I'm still alive
When everyone who loves me has died
I'm willing to wait for it
I'm willing to wait for it"

An Appetizer: Purpose

David Chapman presents a path for truth-seekers who need to derive their values from first principles. TLDR: Be "enjoyably useful"

Intimations of a New Worldview

Brett Anderson tries to reconcile science and religion -- a modern day Robert Pirsig

Bartender Ears

"It's cool to try harder now, but what you choose to try harder at matters, and you should always also not give a fuck. It's cool to try harder not to make any more shitty art, for example, which takes not giving a fuck about letting people see your shitty art along the way so that you can get their feedback and learn to make it better. It's cool to try harder to love people who mean a lot to you, which takes not giving a fuck about…all of the other embarrassments that come with being known."

Ladybird

The movie has it all: the feeling of being unable to love someone you love in the way that they want, forgiving someone trying their best even when they fall short, and family & best friends putting their pride aside and reuniting after temporarily losing their way.

Alain's Comment

One way to make it easier to drop your grudges is to see how funny they look on other people. The ever wise Alain de Botton flips out on someone who negatively reviews his book: "I will hate you til the day and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you ever make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

Louis CK and Marc Maron

Speaking of forgiveness, Louis CK and Marc Maron reconcile on-air and renew their decade long friendship.

Spotlight on Erik's Work

Turpentine is one of the most exciting new media companies in the world.

It's a network of podcasts and newsletters founded on the premise that the world's most interesting, important, and useful ideas come from those with skin in the game, sharing their expertise.

Across its shows and publications, you'll find conversations that you wouldn't hear anywhere else: candid discussions with thinkers and builders, evergreen education, and powerful frameworks for understanding the frontier of every field.

Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Patricia.

Patricia's Picks

On Self-Respect

Joan Didion explores the essence of self-respect and its influence on individual character and society. Her last sentence has stayed with me for many years: "However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."

Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real

Paired with Statement of Teaching Philosophy (poetry). We live in a world of abstractions in our head. This essay and poem reminds me that reality is the pulsing flush of the present when all sense gates are open and our conceptual filters have retreated.

Living Like Weasels

Dillard reflects on a surprising encounter with a weasel, using it to delve into themes of instinct, necessity, and the purity of living fully in the present moment. "The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity."

Ideas are Alive and You are Dead

This essay dives into the creative process, suggesting that ideas choose minds as habitats, thriving in environments that respect and nurture them. My takeaway is that in the meandering journey of creation, what is in our control is making our minds a more fertile, lovely, and habitable place for ideas to take root.

Three Waypoints On The Journey

Jim Dethmer succinctly outlines three stages of personal and spiritual development: improving the self, questioning the mind's beliefs to find freedom and peace, and discovering the non-existence of a fixed 'me', leading to a fuller experience of life's richness. This maps to my own journey of self-unfolding as well. The most important thing we can ask ourselves: Who am I? Who is asking? Who is aware of being aware?

A Spirituality that Transforms

Ken Wilbur describes the spiritual landscape in the United States as being awash with many "hot tubs of spirituality" - peak experiences, ecstatic states, gurus, and group identifications that feel like genuine progress, but are actually just "ego in drag". In his words: "Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimize the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone."

Wake up, Grow up, Clean up, Show up

This framework emphasizes the importance of holistic development across self-transcendence, psychological development, and showing up in the world in service to the collective well-being.

A Pilgrimage for Book People

On a family's tradition of attending the Brandeis Book Sale, which illustrates a father's deep devotion to books and their influence on the author's life and career choice as a writer. A really wholesome read and a reminder that earnest people exist in spades.

The Long Path that Leads from the Making of Our World to God

Alexander's work is deeply influential to me in my own design practice. In this essay, he explores the profound connection between architecture and spirituality, arguing that mindful architectural practices can enhance the wholeness of the Earth and connect us deeper with ourselves.

In Praise of Shadows

A reflective essay by a retired Japanese architect that delves into the Japanese aesthetics of beauty, emphasizing the importance and allure of subtlety and shadow. In a world of sterile lights and mass produced objects, this comes as a welcome reprieve.

When Jane Jacobs Took on the World

Paired with Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (film). If you don't already know Jane Jacobs you should. Despite her lack of formal credentials, Jane significantly influenced American urban planning by challenging established theories and advocating for city diversity, neighborhood value, and mixed-use development. However, the idea I find most compelling from Jacobs is that cities are biological organisms and should be designed recursively to engender organized chaos.

Join or Die (documentary)

A documentary on America's civic unraveling seen through the journey of social scientist Robert Putnam, whose groundbreaking "Bowling Alone" research into America's decades-long decline in community connections holds answers to our democracy's present crisis.

In the Mood for Love (film)

All of Wong Kar-wai's films are beautiful, but this one is my favorite.

Spotlight on Patricia's Work

The Commons SF

A community and fourth place dedicated to open-ended curiosity, play, & collective flourishing in the heart of San Francisco. If you live in San Francisco, swing by, say hi, and consider becoming a member!

Rabbit Holes

Patricia is one of the most prolific and thoughtful curators on the internet. I love the questions she asks:

did this move my heart?

did this change my mind?

does this content make me a better person?

do I want to send it to close friends asap?

is it intelligently-written, heart-felt, and thoughtful?

will I refer to it over & over again later?