The Accidental Billionaires

Ben Mezrich

Doing Justice. A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law

Preet Bharara

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt (finished in January, 2020)

Articles – the standouts

Things that I ⭐️’d because I especially enjoyed them, starting with the most recently read. The full list is included below.

1. It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done
2. The 4 ‘Attachment Styles,’ and How They Sabotage Your Work-Life Balance
3. How to apply a design thinking, HCD, UX or any creative process from scratch
4. How to Build Portfolios That Win Business
5. How To Organize Files In A Design Agency
6. Advertising is in crisis, but it's not because it doesn't work
7. Frank Chimero · A Modest Guide to Productivity (Reread)

Articles – the full list

1. Joe Biden’s Zombie Campaign
2. A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys
3. Nadia Eghbal | The perks of patronage
4. Nadia Eghbal | The tyranny of ideas
5. The WeWork effect | The Outline
6. Stacking the Bricks: How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting
7. A Cybersecurity Firm’s Sharp Rise and Stunning Collapse | The New Yorker
8. My Wife’s Enemies Are Now My Enemies, Too
9. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard: How to save Planet Earth
10. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Vogue Cover: The World According to The Creator of Fleabag | Vogue
11. Phoebe Waller-Bridge: ‘There was an alternative ending to Fleabag ... but I’ll never tell’ | Books | The Guardian
12. Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. - The New York Times
13. The Moods of Ernest Hemingway | The New Yorker
14. Don’t Eat Before Reading This
15. Emotional Baggage: Inside the Toxic Work Environment at Away
16. Questlove: My Favorite Things of the Decade - Rolling Stone
17. 52 things I learned in 2019 - Fluxx Studio Notes - Medium
18. Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All’
19. How Kamala Harris’s Campaign Unraveled - The New York Times
20. Book Excerpt: ‘Wild and Crazy Guys’ on John Candy
21. “You Don’t Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader”: Inside the Fall of WeWork | Vanity Fair
22. The Jungle Prince of Delhi - The New York Times
23. The Streaming Era Has Finally Arrived. Everything Is About to Change. - The New York Times
24. Creating Product Stickiness – Will Robbins
25. Amazon Warehouse Reports Show Worker Injuries - The Atlantic
26. The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder | WIRED
27. Tesla Cybertruck first ride: inside Elon Musk’s electric pickup truck - The Verge
28. How regular phone interviews with users gets us excellent insights
29. With a Net Worth of $950 Million, Why Does Jerry Seinfeld Still Work So Hard? His Response Is a Master Class in Achieving Incredible Success | Inc.com
30. What Would Mr. Rogers Do – The Atlantic
31. The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
32. Freelance & Company
33. The bizarre logic of the many-worlds theory
34. I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times
35. The History of Ken Doll's Crotch
36. Self Sabotage: The Strange Swiss History of Rigging Vital Infrastructure to Explode - 99% Invisible
37. No One Cares - The Book of LifeThe Book of Life
38. Lana Del Rey’s career explains a shift in how we think about pop stars - Vox
39. Witch Houses of the Hudson Valley | The New Yorker
40. Condé Nast’s Future Under Anna Wintour and Roger Lynch
41. A metaphorical explanation for the Internet (for planners)
42. When the Web Was Weird
43. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam Run by Fake Hosts on Airbnb - VICE
44. Toward agelessism: reflections on turning 50 in advertising | AdAge
45. This Is How It’s Gonna Work
46. Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People | WIRED
47. Quantum weirdness is everywhere in the living world | Aeon Essays
48. You’re probably using the wrong dictionary « the jsomers.net blog
49. The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time
50. The Improbable True Story of How 'Clerks' Was Made - VICE
51. Words from Ben Malbon, Google Sponsor
52. How Do You Like We Now - Bloomberg
53. Five Reasons the Diet Soda Myth Won’t Die - The New York Times
54. The Liberation of Mitt Romney - The Atlantic
55. Hacking My ADHD - Magenta
56. "Fight Club", "Fleabag" and The Battle Against Toxicity | The Spool
57. Defiant Dave Chappelle | National Review
58. George Conway: Trump Is Unfit for Office - The Atlantic
59. Anatomy of the phone call now imperiling Trump's presidency
60. Book Excerpt: ‘MINDF*CK’ by Christopher Wylie
61. Dear Ueno: What’s your design process like? - Ueno.
62. Are U.S. Railroad Gauges Based on Roman Chariots?
63. The Lost Man - The California Sunday Magazine
64. Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper
65. Frank Chimero · A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way
66. Universal Laws of the World · Collaborative Fund
67. Will the Ukraine Scandal Be Trump’s Downfall?
68. “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell - Ben Yan
69. A New Theory of Obesity - Scientific American
70. Writing Docs at Amazon - Noteworthy - The Journal Blog
71. What Your Politics Do To Your Morals
72. Who Would Tavi Gevinson Be Without Instagram?
73. Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making
74. The Book of Prince | The New Yorker
75. A Game of Giants — Wait But Why
76. The Great Battle of Fire and Light — Wait But Why
77. The Perils of Semi-Legal Poker | The New Yorker
78. Apple VP Nick Law on the future of creative agencies | Contagious
79. How YouTube Radicalized Brazil
80. The Bizarre And Intriguing Johnny Sands Humanoid Encounter Case
81. How One Parking Lot Photograph Conquered The Internet - VICE
82. Chuck Anderson opens up about imitation, inspiration and Us By Night
83. Malcolm Gladwell Explains Why It’s So Hard to Spot a Lie
84. What Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Really Sells to Women - The Atlantic
85. Shut Up and Take My Money! — Postlight — Digital Product Studio
86. Choosing React First — Postlight — Digital Product Studio
87. The Anthropocene is a Joke - The Atlantic
88. Exclusive: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what’s next for Tumblr - The Verge
89. GMUNK (Bradley G. Munkowitz) on the importance of personal design work | Avocode Blog
90. Through a White House, darkly
91. Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump | The New Yorker
92. The Wizard of Oz: five appalling on-set stories
93. The Adults In The Room
94. The tragic horizon: Resisting marketing’s drift towards the business of value destruction — Martin Weigel
95. Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech | WIRED
96. OuiWork? The quick case for WeWork as an actually disruptive business – alexdanco.com
97. WeWork isn’t a tech company; it’s a soap opera - The Verge
98. Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out - The New York Times
99. How a 6,000-Year-Old Dog Cancer Spread Around the World | WIRED
100. Ebola Is Now Curable. Here’s How the New Treatments Work | WIRED
101. Living on Earth: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
102. Nicolas Cage on Acting, Philosophy and Searching for the Holy Grail - The New York Times
103. ‘Socialism for the rich’: the evils of bad economics | Inequality | The Guardian
104. The Story Behind MLB’s Longtime Mud Suppliers | SI.com
105. How You Can Tell You’re Getting Better - Modus
106. Tips from 16 years of working from home – A Whole Lotta Nothing
107. The Day the Music Burned - The New York Times
108. Making Peace With The Feast Or Famine Of Freelancing — Smashing Magazine
109. A Year of Working Remotely » Mike Industries
110. Brand Twitter Grows Up
111. The Holy Grail of Restoration – Kosmos Journal
112. the “future of work” is here... so why aren’t more companies remote-first?
113. The Acronym that Saves Lives
114. The Modern Front-End Design System Stack | Jxnblk
115. Who wants Marianne Williamson in the White House? — Quartzy
116. A People Leader's Guide to Active Listening
117. Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class - WSJ
118. Structuring strategic storytelling - School of Planning - Medium
119. The Spy Who Came Home | The New Yorker
120. Better to have a few rats than to be one - Baltimore Sun
121. This is Going to Get Worse | Ed Burmila
122. Think FaceApp Is Scary? Wait Till You Hear About Facebook | WIRED
123. The Border Patrol Hits a Breaking Point - POLITICO Magazine
124. Frank Chimero on causing 'good trouble' and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture | Creative Boom
125. ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump - POLITICO Magazine
126. Lost in translation: Epic goes to Denmark - POLITICO
127. The Hotel Hackers Are Hiding in the Remote Control Curtains - Bloomberg
128. It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done - The New York Times
129. The 4 ‘Attachment Styles,’ and How They Sabotage Your Work-Life Balance - The New York Times
130. Superhuman is Spying on You » Mike Industries
131. The Perks and Pitfalls of Working Remotely | Muse by Clio
132. Looking back at 5 years of WARPED - Kris Hoet - Medium
133. Foreshadowing an internet health crisis
134. Jony Ive Is Leaving Apple, but His Departure Started Long Ago - WSJ
135. Why plants don’t die from cancer | PBS NewsHour
136. How E-Commerce Sites Manipulate You Into Buying Things You May Not Want - The New York Times
137. BBC - Future - The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
138. What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble - Dribbble - Medium
139. War Photographer Robert Capa and his Coverage of D-day | Vanity Fair
140. Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s web browser has become spy software - The Washington Post
141. What It’s Actually Like to Be on House Hunters – Twice.
142. Chernobyl Mastermind Craig Mazin Breaks Down All His Writing Tips and Techniques
143. The world according to Frank Ocean | Dazed
144. Does anyone want to hear a story??? | The Outline
145. How Airbnb Built an In-House Architectural Design Team
146. The New Wilderness (Idle Words)
147. Why Is Mike Gravel Running for President? (And Is He?)
148. Overdeliver - DESK Magazine
149. Drugs That Boost Our Circadian Rhythms Could Save Our Lives | WIRED
150. Apple's 'Find My' Feature Uses Some Very Clever Cryptography | WIRED
151. Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos - The Atlantic
152. Our changing climate and the road ahead
153. Stephen Colbert on the Political Targets of Satire - The New York Times
154. Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
155. How Liberals Fell In Love With The West Wing | Current Affairs
156. Scott And Scurvy (Idle Words)
157. What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns (Idle Words)
158. Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question - The New York Times
159. How TurboTax Used Design and Emotion to Solve a Boring Problem and Dominate an $11B Industry
160. Dementia Stopped Peter Max From Painting. For Some, That Spelled a Lucrative Opportunity. - The New York Times
161. Gates' Law: How Progress Compounds and Why It Matters
162. 5G Is Going to Transform Smartphones — Eventually
163. How Cereal Marketers Invented the Modern Version of Breakfast - The Atlantic
164. 'Breakfast Food' Is a Lie - The Atlantic
165. How To Manage Anxiety & Depression in 10 Easy* Steps
166. Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard on Mindful Consumption – B the Change
167. Behind Twitter’s Plan To Get People To Stop Yelling At Each Other
168. The Coming Generation War
169. I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah
170. Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry | WIRED
171. Opinion | It’s Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times
172. Why Madame X Scandalized the Art World
173. Lil Nas X Added Billy Ray Cyrus to ‘Old Town Road.’ Is It Country Enough for Billboard Now? - The New York Times
174. Conan O’Brien: Why I Decided to Settle a Lawsuit Over Alleged Joke Stealing
175. Trick Out Your Terminal in 10 Minutes or Less – Towards Data Science
176. What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Mascots We Love and Hate – Adweek
177. Stay Alfred bolsters its C-suite > Spokane Journal of Business
178. Motel 6, Tom Bodett and the Ad Campaign That Put Us on the Map | Muse by Clio
179. Enemies No More: Microsoft Brings the Linux Kernel to Windows | WIRED
180. How Twisted Graphene Became the Big Thing in Physics | Quanta Magazine
181. Adapt or Die — Charlie Ebdy: Unplanning
182. ‘If You Want to Kill Someone, We Are the Right Guys’ | WIRED
183. Champion Accidentally Hit the Fashion Jackpot - Bloomberg
184. The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret - The New York Times
185. AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld | WIRED
186. Meet Jim Allison, the Carousing Texan Who Just Won a Nobel Prize for His Cancer Immunotherapy Breakthrough | WIRED
187. SNL’s Photographer on the Stories Behind Her Best Portraits
188. Insurgents Seek to Oust Wayne LaPierre in N.R.A. Power Struggle - The New York Times
189. Getting to the bottom of line height in Figma
190. My So-Called Creative Process – Magenta
191. The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation - Issue 70: Variables - Nautilus
192. Where Does the Design Agency Go from Here? – Edenspiekermann – Medium
193. Robert Caro: ‘The more facts you collect, the closer you come to the truth’ | Books | The Guardian
194. Hot Topic Is Still Hot - The New York Times
195. Heaven or High Water – Popula
196. How to Write Email with Military Precision
197. Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart
198. Marcus, Casper, Oscar: Why Startups Are Obsessed With Human Names - Bloomberg
199. Are you sure you want to go freelance? - Work Notes
200. Michelin restaurants and fabulous wines: Inside the secret team dinners that have built the Spurs' dynasty
201. Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A. | The New Yorker
202. Stephen Curry Has a Popcorn Problem - The New York Times
203. Designing for Mental Health – Magenta
204. 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook | WIRED
205. ‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum - The New York Times
206. Pete Buttigieg Debuts a Radical New Approach to Campaign Branding
207. They Had It Coming. What the College-Admissions Scandal Reveals - The Atlantic
208. What seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a company
209. We refreshed Figma’s UI: An inside look at our process
210. PITCH: Innocent?
211. Everything I know about freelancing | Andy Adams
212. Red Flags to Watch for with Potential Clients - DESK Magazine
213. The Day the Dinosaurs Died | The New Yorker
214. How to apply a design thinking, HCD, UX or any creative process from scratch
215. Dick's (DKS) CEO Ed Stack Says Gun Shift Cut Sales by $150M - Bloomberg
216. 14 Professional Copywriting Secrets Every Specifier Wished You Knew - Pauley Creative
217. How to Build Portfolios That Win Business – Felicia C. Sullivan – Medium
218. How To Organize Files In A Design Agency - Clay
219. If it Ain’t Broke, Break it: The Signal Theory Re-Brand
220. Magpie marketing – Alex Murrell – Medium
221. Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good - The New York Times
222. How To Write an “About Me” Page That Gets You Hired - Adobe 99U
223. 88 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life
224. Follow Elizabeth Warren's Excellent Budgeting Advice
225. How Matisse’s Cut-outs Took Over the Illustration World | | Eye on Design
226. How to Promote Yourself Online When You’re a Total Introvert - Adobe 99U
227. Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday - Bloomberg
228. How Mike Abbink Built IBM Design to Celebrate Man and Machine
229. 10-Steps to a Friction-Free App. – Sequoia Capital Publication – Medium
230. The Moment I Was About to Give Up, I Turned My Freelance Career Around
231. The Six Templates of Successful Advertising – Faris – Medium
232. The value of deep work is your only real value - Adliterate
233. How Disney Built Star Wars, in real life – TechCrunch
234. The Catharsis of ‘Pen15’ - The New York Times
235. Arresting the Unjustly Homeless While They Learn to Code
236. You keep using that word | A Working Library
237. The Gig Lifestyle Offers Even The Most Skilled Among Us The Chance To Live Their Dream
238. How to Land Better Projects- Values to Live By | Underbelly Creative
239. Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris on leaving Hollywood behind: “They can blow me”
240. Running A Design Studio: Here’s Our Source Code – Ritik Dholakia – Medium
241. A Book Apart, Authors Answer: What are your top tips for working remotely?
242. The Untold Story of the Man Who Sang “I Got 5 on It” - The Ringer
243. Six Rules to be a Good Teammate in Your Marriage - Dialed In Men
244. Ricky Gervais Will Never Back Down | Vanity Fair
245. It’s All Got A Bit Flabby – CHAPTER – Medium
246. A guide to starting your own design studio from Hawraf
247. You May Have Forgotten Foursquare, but It Didn’t Forget You | WIRED
248. Design As Change Agent: Interview With Brian Collins
249. How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure
250. Karen O and Danger Mouse Made an Album. It Only Took 11 Years. - The New York Times
251. Barack Obama's advice for handling tough decisions — Quartz at Work
252. Opinion | Luke Perry Had a Stroke and Died. I Had One and Lived. - The New York Times
253. 5 Guidelines for Connected Health UX – Punchcut – Medium
254. The Future of Healthcare: How Ro helps providers treat patients 2 mins, 2 days, 2 weeks, and 2…
255. Overlooked No More: The Underground Graffiti Adventures of Dondi - The New York Times
256. The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker
257. The ‘C’ Word – CHAPTER – Medium
258. Freddie Mercury: Queen’s Tragic Rhapsody – Rolling Stone
259. When Work Tries To Destroy You … | The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod (Help Me Grow!)
260. Let’s Talk About Story – How to Build a Brand – Medium
261. Trust me, you don’t want to know what happens to email you send | The Outline
262. The BuzzFeed Lesson – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
263. Let’s Talk About Brand Discovery – How to Build a Brand – Medium
264. The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge
265. The way the brain buys - The science of shopping
266. A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions | The New Yorker
267. Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure—Stephen Wolfram Blog
268. Want to Know What Your Customers Want? Go to… Amazon and YouTube
269. The Machine Stops | The New Yorker
270. Let’s Talk About How to Build a Brand – How to Build a Brand – Medium
271. How the Design of My New Blog Came to Live | Veerle’s Blog 4.0
272. Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach | WIRED
273. “She Never Looks Back”: Inside Elizabeth Holmes’s Final Months at Theranos | Vanity Fair
274. The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet | WIRED
275. Ricky Jay, the Magician with an Edge
276. “Break-Even Points for Value Pricing,” an article by Dan Mall
277. Journalism Isn't Dying. It's Returning to Its Roots | WIRED
278. The Local News Business Model – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
279. Do Animals Have Feelings? - The Atlantic
280. Opinion | Esquire’s Cover Boy and Our Culture of Shame - The New York Times
281. Big Spaceship: The Indie Agency That Grew Up With the Internet - Adobe 99U
282. Is "the Hum" a scientific fact or a mass delusion? | The New Republic
283. Five years, that’s not too long – Ueno.
284. Five myths about advertising – Rick Webb – Medium
285. "Down The Rabbit Hole I Go": How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies To Her Death
286. Navigation Should Be Boring - Allen Pike
287. No thank you, Mr. Pecker – Jeff Bezos – Medium
288. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline
289. Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company
290. Salary Negotiation Done Right – Hacker Noon
291. What Digital Creative Agencies Can Expect in 2019 - Adobe 99U
292. What It Felt Like to Almost Die – Christen O'Brien – Medium
293. The World Might Actually Run Out of People | WIRED
294. How to Do a Data ‘Cleanse’ - The New York Times
295. How to Choose the Wrong Creative Agency to Work At
296. Kamala Harris runs with Type Network type · News · Type Network
297. How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth - Digiday
298. WNW MAGAZINE – Am I Depressed or Am I Just a Freelancer?
299. I’ve cried on a few runs lately. – heidi hackemer – Medium
300. What the 4% of Americans who believe in lizard people an teach us about conspiracy theories — Quartz
301. The Keys to a Great Rebrand: Advice From the Duo Who Revamped Chobani and Spotify - Adobe 99U
302. Advertising is in crisis, but it's not because it doesn't work
303. How To Be Successful - Sam Altman
304. How the Great Recession Influenced a Decade of Design
305. Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets • Opaque Link
306. ‘Everything is not going to be okay’: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble - The Washington Post
307. Beyond the interface – Base Voices
308. The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives, by Robert A. Caro | The New Yorker
309. The Family That Built an Empire of Pain | The New Yorker
310. Could Pete Buttigieg Become the First Millennial President? - The Washington Post
311. The Art of the Pan: What’s the Point of a Bad Review in 2019? - The Ringer
312. The Plot Against George Soros
313. The Fall and Rise of M. Night Shyamalan – Rolling Stone
314. The Billion Dollar Ego
315. How Trump Could Wind up Making Globalism Great Again | WIRED
316. Hold my beer. I'm going to make the case for data
317. One Couple’s Tireless Crusade to Stop a Genetic Killer | WIRED
318. Police, Computing, and Nationalism | Kamau Bobb
319. Say hello, new logo | The Official Slack Blog
320. From Strategist to Scrappy Designer – R/GA by Design
321. What’s Better Than One Mysterious Cosmic Signal?
322. Life Beyond The Far Side - TIME
323. The Quest to be a Creative Superpower | MxMIndia
324. Why big companies squander brilliant ideas
325. How London can solve its violent crime problem by copying Glasgow | WIRED UK
326. T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T Are Selling Customers' Real-Time Location Data, And It's Falling Into the Wrong Hands - Motherboard
327. Welcome to 2019: The unsustainable ad agency business model
328. The Sound That Haunted Diplomats in Cuba? Crickets. - The Atlantic
329. What Leading Companies Never Want to See In Your Portfolio - DESK Magazine
330. Working remotely is sorta like living in outer space
331. How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
332. The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter - The New York Times
333. A to Z of Modern Living: Vitsœ's headquarters in Leamington Spa
334. Frank Chimero · The Long, Hard, Stupid Way
335. Apple’s Precarious and Pivotal 2019 – 500ish Words
336. How to Make Google Docs Look Like Dropbox Paper
337. How to Manage Your Audience in Mailchimp
338. Frank Chimero · A Modest Guide to Productivity (reread)
339. Design Sprint Inventor Jake Knapp on How a Design Story Gets You Hired
340. The 'Future Book' Is Here, but It's Not What We Expected | WIRED
341. The Sugar Industry's Secret Science Is Being Exposed By Ex-Dentist Cristin Kearns
342. Choose-Your-Own-Bandersnatch – Jason Zada – Medium