My Reading List
These are the articles and essays I've saved because of their timeless relevance to human decision making, social struggle, and technology development. In many cases I've saved copies of the articles in case they get taken down, especially with the section of news pieces that are very inconvenient to the current regime in the US.
How to Make (Consistently) Good Decisions
When your job requires you to make consequential decisions every day, alone or in collaboration with others, it can help to have some grounding philosophies.
The importance of doing nothing for mental growth and good decision making
On figuring forward and coping with uncertainty
What installing solar panels does to your thinking about electricity usage
Think “could” not “should” for creative problem-solving
What if instead of managing your time, you set it free?
Using “What Would Have to Be True” to complete the logic circle and vet your ideas
How to choose the right personal project ("How to Make Something People Give a Shit About")
The trajectory from half-truth to “zombie stat”, and how to see through propaganda
Liberate your time from the effects of Sunk Cost Fallacy and Outcome Bias
Ideas about psychologically coping with a dark age
The importance of making a decision, even when only an imperfect decision is possible
Identify and stop doing things that you don’t enjoy and only do because you think you need to be a certain persona
Research Praxis
Sigma Xi synthesizes efforts to redefine or better define what constitutes excellent research
Lockhart’s Lament about how nobody teaches actual math any more
The problem with “sugar daddy” science/engineering
“Antedisciplinary” science: transcending disciplinary walls when the problem at hand calls for a new discipline/method/praxis
The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research (the essay every researcher in existence deserves a copy of)
Fraud within research on fraud itself - makes the case for publishing data, not just results
Software Praxis
In software, catastrophic failures are usually design flaws - Atlantic
When some nincompoop deleted an 11-line package called left-pad and broke the internet
Lessons from the LastPass breach
Don’t use ChatGPT to diagnose yourself; it's very bad at individual context
In web development, don’t blindly follow the giants when you’re a startup
Disaster: CSAM in AI training datasets
Quora answers to “why do companies use C++ if C is ‘faster’” provide fresh perspective on how engineering happens at all the levels of reality:
LLMs, Google Gemini, Gmail, and “prompt injection attack” worries
Practical Guidance/PSA
Health and Culture / Just Great Essays
The internet has made health anxiety so much worse…
Wheelchair rugby, nicknamed “murderball,” is not for the faint of heart:
Movement as collective liberation, from a Pilates instructor who doesn’t look like the model
Hasan Minhaj explains himself, comically
Context on the captivating idea of Emotionally Immature Parents and the book
To get past the hesitation to reach out to an old dormant friend, try “warming up” with messages to current contacts first
The Satanic Temple Gray Faction’s Open Letter to DID community and those with recovered memories
About adult co-housing projects in the US
People with troubling intrusive thoughts/hearing voices brought about dramatic relief via “avatar therapy” where they talk to a digital avatar of their intrusive voice
Medical community (finally) adopting Body Roundness Index over BMI
The Church of "Don't Google Us" of Latter-Day Saints
Choice words about apostasy by leaders
More messages and writings about apostates
Compilation of plagiarisms and redactions in the Book of Mormon (There used to be a website dedicated to this, but its domain has expired as of time of writing, March 2025).
Recovering Agency, the best, most exhaustive launchpad for reading on Mormon cult mind control (Luna Lindsey compiled from the literature descriptions of 31 techniques humans use to manipulate each others' thoughts and feelings worldwide, then they showed how each one is manifest in Mormonism)
What to do with $150bn “nest egg”? Go on a super opulent temple spree of course!
Temple name oracle: (If you went through the endowment rite in the temple, the "new name" they gave you is actually the same as everyone who went through that day, and you can prove that to yourself on this site)
The problematic official policies about overnight activities: (Assumes that breaking people up by sex, and having two untrained lay leaders instead of one, magically solves all the safety problems)
Other cults...
Gentrification and Enshittification: A critical lens on the modern tech world
Airspace: why every urban coffee shop looks the same around the world
Why tech workers and gig workers should collaborate in the struggle
Business Culture / World of Work
Forbes: timely review of how DEI makes teams perform better
The four types of employees and why Disagreeable Givers are the best
More on the above + why it’s hard for women to get away with being Disagreeable Givers
“The Problem with Being a Top Performer” - research on how coworkers punish star employees
Ceasing low-value work is essential to your professional survival right now
“How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job”: the profit-driven fragmentation of writing work, great example of reorganization that’s blind to how decisions are made
Second-time entrepreneur shares insights from her failed startup that she’ll carry into her new one
Interesting Developments in Science and Technology
Paper that addresses cloud lab services in the context of increasing reproducibility in synthetic biology. Citation: Jessop-Fabre MM and Sonnenschein N (2019) Improving Reproducibility in Synthetic Biology. Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol. 7:18.
doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2019.00018
First human ‘pangenome' study; humanity's origins a "loosely structured stem"
New research on how autoimmune diseases drive some cases of schizophrenia
The state of gene synthesis applications today, in an excellent NYT article
New computational methods to model reaction transition states
State of biology on how dreams are formed, how they are connected to memories and how they are novel, functional/evolutionary implications
Updates on efforts to measure the Hubble Constant, rate of expansion of universe, age of universe
Solid-state batteries made by MIT startup 24M vs Tesla batteries
Getting away from "mass balance" as a way of measuring recycled content in consumer plastics, and possible alternatives
Policy and Politics
The specific reason American politics has become so polarized, performative and confrontational as of 2022, and what to do about it
“I Didn’t Write That” by David Kaiser, the MIT one
Conspiracy Theory thinking - a compilation of online resources
Why Most Gun Laws Aren’t Backed Up by Evidence (complete with advice for lawmakers who have to deal with that)
The article (regarding healthcare) that I can send my family if they ever suggest moving to Texas again
US life expectancy disparities
An army veteran on why the assault rifle debate is really ridiculous (and no, this is not an attack on the 2nd Amendment)
A Bad Moon Rises over UK Higher Education (tuition and admin bloat, erosion of tenure, nonsense like that)
Navigating cities while aging: elder people report the access barriers they face, and public health expert responds with context on those problems
Venture Capitalists wield too much economic and political power without understanding economic forces…
What if the US had 5-6 political parties based on opinions on major policy issues? Take the quiz to place you in a new party.
Social Justice - Topical deep-dives, not just news
White male supremacy lies and anger
Middle Class Standard Time, and impediment to deep conversations
Radical disability justice in practice
Labor’s Southern strategy
Comic explaining how Joy Boulamwini’s work fights algorithmic bias
Why poverty porn needs to stop
Signs of a post-COVID rent revolution emerging in Kansas City
Education injustice via infrastructure in Idaho (little ones going to school in their winter coats because there's no heating)
How the US/UK criminal justice system fails autistic people by not seeing us
How (lack of) bathroom access is a public health issue
Rot - the corruption of elite universities in the US
The ‘568 Cartel’ complaint elite universities settled for $118,000,000 (I kind of think that number is too small?)
What it’s like to live in the world as a sociopath
Trauma in Gaza is beyond PTSD because it isn’t post; it's continuous
How Atlanta, Georgia ended up with 1/4 of the affordable housing it needs to implement the laws about fair housing, and Black residents got displaced multiple times
The emotional experience of gun ownership (As with most weapons-research stuff, we really need more info along these lines but won’t get it tomorrow)
The International Convention on the Rights of the Child
What disabled folks actually need to be able to work part or full-time
Indigenous Environmental Network calls for moratorium on false climate solutions, such as carbon “markets”, ahead of COP29
Announcement of SPLC “Keep Her Safe” report about school police officers harassing Black girls and making them less safe at school
How the fire in Lahaina may ironically present an opportunity to restore the town’s historic waterways, sacred sites, government sites, and ecosystem; the fight for water between residents and corporations
SPLC lawsuit gets a Georgia teenager with dyslexia the services she’s entitled to after years of educational neglect by the school district
SPLC oral history project to preserve the community of Royal, one of the last remaining post-Civil-War Black homesteading communities; WATCH THE VIDEO, IT’S AMAZING
“Gamification” can be used for good or ill, and Amazon’s Automated Mechanical Turks
Synthesis report: how SPLC researchers + media + voters drove “Blood Tribe” white supremacist paramilitary training camp out of Maine
Diana Khwaelid on what it’s like being a female Palestinian journalist raised and located in Tulkarem
Photo essay: When Harlem was “As Gay as it was Black”
Community organizing to influence housing development in Gulfport, MS
Chaos in the organ transplant system as sick patients at the top of the list are skipped over so collecting agencies can do more convenient “open offers” to their favorite hospitals
SPLC: MS re-entry’s success in helping justice-impacted/disenfranchised Mississippians register to vote or restore their voting rights
In the News: Signs of the Times
2025
Troubling advances in the biology/pathology of bird flu
All the ways federal employees have been fighting back against the administrative coup
U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigns in protest after Trump Justice Department ordered her to drop the case against Mayor Adams
2024
Hochul halts congestion pricing in NYC - analysis
SPLC helps document activities of Nazi, stop Nazi enclave in Maine
The year after a denied abortion in Tennessee, one family’s struggle
Paramedic sentenced to prison in Elijah McClain killing; reforms following that
‘They Play Nice’: Inside the Tensions and Tumult at ‘Queer Eye’
March for justice at Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama continues - 59 years after Bloody Sunday
US Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against Apple 2024
NYT “The Morning” covers latest on both theories of COVID origin (natural transmission and lab leak)
Yields so far from the IRS “crackdown” on delinquent millionaires
SPLC launches Alabama Advocacy Institute to train community leaders in movement-growing and change-making tactics
The dying office building market in NYC exemplified by the sale of 135 West 50th Street for 2.5% of what the sellers paid for it
Labor abuses abroad by US manufacturers - two articles on the sugar mills in India that social auditor company Bonsucro certifies, and how and why abuse persists
CrowdStrike Outage Root Cause Analysis
Lawsuit against 6 major academic publishers for antitrust/price-fixing and illegally profiting from public funds
Wall Street analyst walks from DC to NY to promote corporate DEI
National Forest Service loses funding, has to stop hiring seasonal workers —> chaos is coming
Young woman with hydrocephalus almost got institutionalized in a psych ward but an ER doctor intervened and saved her
How Nigerians are fighting back against kito (app-based gay entrapment, very violent)
Photo Essay on the US’s nuclear weapon arsenal revamp, how tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on that without most taxpayers realizing:
FDA commissioner Dr Kessler on why bird flu is concerning
Futurists present the “Black Swan” events that could upend our way of life in 2025
NYT 2024 Year in Pictures
December 2024 article about how Musk and SpaceX have drawn federal scrutiny for failing to abide by security reporting regulations, needed for Musk’s high-level security clearance, since at least 2021
2023
Tech activists build apps to help NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean
Why Tyrell Terry left the NBA - intersects family, society, mental health
Russians who fled the war making new lives in Georgia and Armenia
Big book publishers suing Florida school district over book bans
Activists sue to challenge Harvard legacy admissions after SCOTUS anti-affirmative action decision
Then this happens, not long after (2024 insert, Supreme Court won't hear the case) (Insert rant about the false assumption that it's all about merit here)
FTC investigates OpenAI over ChatGPT
The Kids on the Night Shift (immigrant children found working dangerous jobs in mass numbers)
Many streams of data —> many vantage points on reproduction trends
Insight on the lives of 13-year-olds coming into social media right now
Tr*mp and the 2024 ballot
Architecture firm proposes half a million housing units in NY metro area
Crows and magpies use anti-bird spikes as nesting materials
History and current status of tipping/gratuity culture
2022
Saudi woman’s phone has evidence of NSO Group spyware due to a bug and NSO Group gets sued
How downtowns of mid-size cities are bouncing back from COVID
The Gonzalez vs Google case: can Google be liable for its algorithm promoting illegal content to certain users?
Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” death spiral: resignations at Twitter, delays at Tesla, predictions
Current American opinions about marijuana legalization
Villreal’s actual free speech violation in Texas