Recommendations
Written for entries to flow into each other rather than ranked in order. A recommendation does not equal an endorsement of the positions advanced by the creator(s). Sometimes it can be enlightening to consume something that is high quality yet disagreeable. Check ratings to make sure you're comfortable with the content.
Blogs
Rationalist
Astral Codex Ten
Scott Alexander's Substack successor to Slate Star Codex. Legendary science communicator, great writer, less interesting when he gets political. One of my favorite blogs.
Less Wrong
The rationalist community blog. Scott got his start here. Be warned, some people find them so detestable that they've formed entire anti-rationalist communities. I don't even disagree with most of their criticisms, but it can't be denied that the rationalists are outputting high effort content that seems a little more edifying to spend time on (While forming your own opinions! The rationalists might be completely wrong about everything but at least they are high effort, high quality falsehoods) than haters doing what they gonna do. Also, the web design is sweet.
Gwern
Another prominent rationalist, this time with an over-engineered website and a dogged fixation on a strange grab bag of topics. There's something charming about the unapologetic nerdiness he attacks his subjects with, writing way more words than necessary and accumulating huge amounts of visualizations and links.
Dynomight
Another rationalist-adjacent self-experimenter, this one with an under-engineered site. He convinced me that aspartame is extremely low-risk and that fixing your air quality is one of the highest impact health interventions. Dry sense of humor and great writing.
Matt Lakeman
Unhinged self experiments and travel logs that will appeal to someone who reads Wikipedia for fun.
Engineering
Applied Cartography
Justin Duke blogs about his experience as a "yeoman" engineer, quietly tending to his little product that he bootstrapped without external funding.
Irrational Exuberance
The rare engineering blog from an executive perspective. Everyone can be a better leader no matter their org-chart position.
Ryan Ashcraft
Another yeoman, this one laboring on the excellent Foodnoms app (a MyFitnessPal alternative that I love).
Martin Fowler
One of the original architects of Agile, Test Driven Development, and other engineering innovations that are just taken for granted these days. Ignore his hard-won wisdom at your peril.
Doug Gregor
He makes Swift. Bottom text.
Corporate Tech Blogs
The engineering challenges that big tech decides to blog about can get really in the weeds. If you want to be a top-tier engineer it can't hurt to pay attention to what esoteric engineering at scale looks like in practice, even if they lack any personality or consistency (it's a different person writing each post). Weak recommendation to DoorDash, Netflix, and Meta (though Meta has an annoying habit of trying to get you to listen to their podcast).
Miscellaneous
Andy Matuschak
Andy has gone through a couple of eras online, including his more conventional blog Square Signals. He has a sweet résumé that includes building iOS and leading R&D at Khan Academy. Nowadays he's doing a lot of exciting independent research and engineering around systems to help us learn better that could genuinely change the world if they work.
ACOUP
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is pop history for the masses, but no less rigorous for it. He has an enormous backlog revolving around his professional academic focus on war in ancient and medieval Europe. My favorite series is his thorough takedown of misconceptions about Sparta.
GioCities
This is the guy that most inspired me to make this website. You may see many parallels in our site format (he's better tho). He writes about nerdy media and more obscure semi-political tech issues that should be of interest to anyone with an investment in the internet. And I guess he's like, a pillar of what remains of the Homestuck fandom?
Silver Bulletin
Cmon, it's Nate Silver! You mostly need to read this so you aren't tempted to go back to the corpse of Disney's FiveThirtyEight which has definitely started to stink in his absence.
Numb at the Lodge
The richest prose style of anyone I read. Kinda political, kinda literary. Always weird.
The Last Psychiatrist
Extremely cynical guy complains about the inauthenticity of modern society. Many of his writings have sort of entered the internet canon.
Books
You can also check out my goodreads
Literature
i.e. not genre fiction
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Each of the brothers will lay bare a different facet of your own psyche and begin to pull at the threads of your web of self-justification until all at once the curtains fall away to reveal a way forward. I have no idea how a mortal wrote this.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A must-read for anyone who's ever done something wrong. So that excludes you, of course.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Emergent narrative springs forth from realized characters. Your enjoyment of the book will be a function of how annoying you find the self-insert named Levin.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoyan maximalism. You will most certainly lose track of the convoluted family trees, even with the wikipedia article constantly open. But there's big payoff for persisting.
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
I might as well get all of the Russian favorites out of the way. The Russian Revolution made personal. The movie does not do it justice.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A gulag prisoner goes about his day. Written by a real life gulag prisoner. Will make you feel cold.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
I think of it as a thematic sequel to the Brothers Karamazov, because it touches on and develops many of the same themes, swapping Russiaisms for Americana.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
It's anti-revenge, actually.
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Historical swashbuckling comedy from the Romantic Era. No movie adaptation has quite nailed the bizarre Monty Python energy.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
An utter immersion into whaling life. Yeah there's some weird psychodrama going on with the titular whale and stuff but it's mostly just cold sea breezes, rough ropes, whipping sails, and spermaceti.
Watership Down
Richard Adams
The primordial British ooze from which Redwall eventually emerged, but markedly more mature.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré
Methodical spy procedural written by an actual spy. Sometimes spywork gets personal.
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
A meticulously researched and extravagantly rendered trilogy that brings Tudor bureaucrat Thomas Cromwell's life into sharp focus. I can't recommend it enough.
Fantasy
The Wheel of Time
Robert Jordan
Do not undertake this series lightly. 14 books at ~800 pages each. The early volumes are too derivative, the middle ones are too boring, and the later ones are too stilted, and yet it's just about the apex of high fantasy. Jordan has a masterful (sometimes repetitive) grasp of the English language. Sanderson wasn't quite up to the task but it was a fine ending. Still a masterclass in foreshadowing and payoff and wrangling an ensemble cast.
The Black Company
Glen Cook
Weird, dark fantasy. Our protagonists are contractors for the evil empire. The framing device of a first-person memoir allows for interesting storytelling tricks.
Perdido Street Station
China Miéville
Weirder, darker fantasy. If you're a fan of Disco Elysium you'll notice they've clearly taken some inspiration from this. Probably my favorite standalone fantasy novel. It should get a movie or video game.
Dune
Frank Herbert
Dune is actually fantasy, ok? And it's genre-defining. The first one, at least. The movies are impossible to grasp without reading it.
A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
The writing! The beautiful, sweet sentences. It's like Tolkien but better.
Elantris
Brandon Sanderson
I'm generally not a huge fan of Sanderson. He has a laser focus on plot and worldbuilding which leaves his characters all sounding like large language models. And his writing is, uh, straightforward. But Elantris is the rare tightly constructed standalone fantasy novel in a sea of series. And it's still got all the unique Sandersonisms that make people love him, including a wild finale. It's the book I recommend to people trying to get into fantasy.
Nonfiction
Anything by David McCullough
David McCullough
1776, Truman, John Adams, you name it, I love it. American Narrative Histories that deeply move me.
Red China Blues
Jan Wong
For all its self-conscious quirk and journalistic turn of phrase, it's a heartfelt examination of China's almost sentimental war against modernity. Made me laugh and cry within the same chapter more than once.
Narconomics
Tom Wainwright
This was one of the first books that genuinely shook my worldview back in high school. It has the necessary rigor to convince you of some rather counterintuitive truths and lead you to dark conclusions about everyone's motives here.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
I think anyone who has an internet connection ought to read this at some point, probably Digital Minimalism too. It's not really a self help book.
Music
Be warned that a lot of these are explicit, though you can often find clean versions for anything that might see the radio.
Hip Hop
Brockhampton
The boyband. An incredible slate of performers and producers that have created some of the most aesthetically cohesive projects in rap. I find myself associating my favorite albums of theirs with seasons of the year: The Saturation trilogy is Summer, Ginger is Winter/Autumn, Roadrunner is Spring.
Favorite Albums: SATURATION, SATURATION II, SATURATION III, GINGER, ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE
Favorite Songs: SWAMP, BUZZCUT, RENTAL, BOY BYE, GOLD, STAINS, STAR, BUZZCUT, GUMMY, SWEET, DON'T SHOOT UP THE PARTY
AG Club
The bay area's own heirs to Brockhampton's youthful megagroup vibe.
Favorite Albums/EPs: BRODIE WORLD, Impostor Syndrome, 2MORE
Favorite Songs: HOT PINK, Tattoo, Memphis, aorta, Barry, CAJH DAY, COLUMBIA, BabyBoy's Interlude
AlttA
French electronic legend 20syl teams up with the underrated Mr. J Medeiros of The Procussions to create sumptuous electro-rap of a quality you can only really get in France, but in English!
Favorite Albums: The Upper Hand, Facing Giants
Favorite Songs: Snow Fire, Under the Water, That Good Ship, Connery, Honorificabilitudinitatibus, Optimum, Falcon Heavy
Aminé
I have to hype up Aminé for repping Portland. He's not afraid to be goofy and he has great musicality and a singing voice that sets him apart from other rappers in his orbit.
Favorite Albums: Good For You, Limbo
Favorite Songs: Spice Girl, Blinds, Sundays, Heebeejeebies, Woodlawn, Compensating, Shimmy, Easy, DR. WHOEVER, Feels So Good, Cool About It
Binary Star
Two young guys met each other in prison in the late 90s and went on to record a classic album that can go toe to toe with Wu-Tang's best work.
Favorite Albums: Masters of the Universe
Favorite Songs: Honest Expression, Reality Check, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Jail), I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Prison), Masters of the Universe, Solar Powered
Black Star
Mos Def and Talib Kweli are both titans in their own right but they are simply a powerhouse together
Favorite Albums: Black Star
Favorite Songs: Brown Skin Lady, Respiration
Childish Gambino
He acts, he directs, he writes, and yes, he raps and sings.
Favorite Albums: "Awaken, My Love!", Atavista
Favorite Songs: Psilocybae, Me and Your Mama, The Worst Guys, Sweatpants, Feels Like Summer
De La Soul
The fathers of alternative hip hop, managed to stay surprisingly relevant and fresh over 4 decades.
Favorite Albums: AOI: Bionix, and the Anonymous Nobody...
Favorite Songs: What We Do, Trying People, Watch Out, Pain, Drawn, Simply, Held Down
Denzel Curry
He made a meme song in 2017 so people didn't really take him seriously but he's actually cracked
Favorite Albums: TA13OO, UNLOCKED, Melt My Eyez See Your Future
Favorite Songs: DIET, TakeItBackv2, 'Cosmic'.m4a, TABOO, BLACK BALLOONS, X-Wing, Troubles
Drapht
I have a weird fixation on Australian hip hop. For some reason I found it before I even found American hip hop. Drapht kinda sounds like an Aussie Eminem.
Favorite Songs: Jimmy Recard, Summer They Say, Don Quixote, Dancin' John Doe, 24hrs of Sunlight
A$AP Rocky
Despite his mainstream appeal he can be surprisingly experimental.
Favorite Albums: TESTING
Favorite Songs: D.M.B, Tailor Swif, Purity, Changes, Kids Turned Out Fine