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 hate threads. Also, their web design is sweet.

Gwern

Another prominent rationalist, this time with an over-engineered website and an autistic fixation on a strange grab bag of subjects. 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

I'm not sure Matt is even aware the rationalists exist, but they seem to like him. Unhinged self experiments and travel logs that will appeal to a Wikipedia reader.

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 Sparta misconceptions.

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

AKA 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. Masterclass in foreshadowing and payoff and wrangling an ensemble cast, but not without its flaws.

The Black Company

Glen Cook

Weird, dark fantasy. Our protagonists are contractors for the evil empire. The framing device of the first-person history 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 they're on the spectrum. 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.