Reading List

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life—money, power, jobs, university admission—should be distributed according to skill and effort.

Inside the chamber it is dark, and the flickers of torchlight play across the features of the men gathered. The meal over, they sit relaxed on long stone benches that face each other in the narrow nave.

I love flags. The power of a piece of cloth to motivate people to fight, revere, or weep is inherently interesting.

What changes can a human undergo without becoming someone different? For example, if a degenerative disease paralyses your body, it’s clearly still you who exists in this transformed state.

A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil.

I first learnt about Plato’s allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd – a strange combination – I played cello and wrote short stories in my spare time.

Nearly all of Earth's organisms communicate with each other in one way or another, from the nods and dances and squeaks and bellows of animals, through to the invisible chemical signals emitted by plant leaves and roots.

Psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in "magic mushrooms," could treat depression by creating a hyper-connected brain.

Scientists may have glimpsed some of the oldest material in the universe. According to a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, researchers found an unidentified object nearly 13.5 billion light years away.

Before anything can be managed, it must be recognized for what it is. This is especially important for complex versus complicated systems. The manager needs to consciously take a mental step back and classify the issues.

The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity. In 1868, the mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proclaimed that an encryption scheme called the Vigenère cipher was “unbreakable.

They’re shi-talky mushrooms. As if mushrooms didn’t seem “magical” enough, UK scientists have found that the multifaceted fungi can reportedly talk to each other — and even have a bountiful vocabulary.

In a city where diplomats and embassies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn Smith was a savant with a secret.

Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave. When two black holes collide, the titanic crash ripples out through the very fabric of the cosmos.

In a few minutes, electronic music will start pulsing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning Technicolor hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will rev into action, bucking off one delighted rider after another.

To make working with OKR more practical, we split up the criteria for Objectives by must-haves and nice-to-haves. An Objective should meet the must-have criteria for it to qualify as an Objective.

"Measures shouldn’t become our goals",  commonplace and sound advice when it comes to metrics.

I’m not famous or successful, so why should you care what I think? Well, I have some observations about the dynamics of writing on the internet that I think my (even more non-famous and non-successful) self would have benefited from when I started.