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Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  AfD support reflects a coherent anti-systemic worldview rather than incoherent or narrowly self-interested preferences.

  Their words

  Rather than thinking of this set of preferences as incoherent, or merely the expression of a sectional petty bourgeois interest, it makes more sense, surely, to view it as a coherent set of anti-systemic views.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

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  A neural network's latent space is closer to an uncopyrightable syntax than to copyrightable expression.

  LLMs

  Their words

  The latent spaces of an LLM are closer to something like a syntax which is not copyrightable.

  Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Usekk.org

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

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  Involuntary patterns reveal something true about a person, and even their deliberate actions are a form of unintentional self-expression.

  Their words

  there exists a wisdom in the involuntary, and that our attempts to shape reality, however intentional, are themselves a form of unintentional expression.

  #281: You, with a layer of paranoia shaved offhaleynahman.substack.com

Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.

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  Any digital identification system built for AI must preserve anonymous human speech, without which there is no genuine freedom of expression.

  Their words

  But a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  You cannot reliably tell how someone feels from their facial expression, and Ekman's universality claim does not survive a reading of the whole literature.

  Their words

  We took stock of the whole literature and asked is this really true? Is Ecman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is well not nearly as well as you would think and in general not.

  youtube.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire

  Their words

  A very good and aggressively readable book about how terrible slavery was in the Roman Empire.

  marginalrevolution.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Putting a price on creative expression makes it suffer, while giving it away freely lets it thrive.

  Their words

  I know my work will suffer if I put a price on creative expression that is as sloppy and homespun as spaghetti, and I know it will thrive if I give it generously and get messy while making it.

  On Monetizationmariandrew.substack.com

Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

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  Number Go Up

  Their words

  I didn't read much non-fiction this year, but the best of what I did read was Zeke Faux's Number Go Up about the cryptocurrency bubble. This book will not change anyone's mind, but it's a readable and entertaining summary of some of the more obvious cryptocurrency scams. I also had enough quibbles with it to write an extended review, which is a compliment of sorts.

  eyrie.org

Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.

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  A Little History of the World

  Their words

  This was probably my favorite book of the year. Gombrich wrote it in six weeks at age 26, aiming to explain world history to children. The result is remarkably readable.

  arslan.io

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop

  Their words

  A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.

  marginalrevolution.com

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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  Our Dollar, Your Problem

  Their words

  This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.

  fivebooks.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Letters From an Imaginary Country

  Their words

  Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!

  pluralistic.net

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  Ideas die on the vine when their visual expression looks wrong, so a prototype built from the real design system gets judged on its merits instead.

  Their words

  it's, I think, critical that ideas don't die on the vine because you've got, um, a visual expression that doesn't match what everyone else expects. Sometimes people will just filter them out because they don't look right.

  youtube.com

Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.

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  Artistic free expression is one of the values a society should work hard to defend, including in what AI is allowed to make.

  Their words

  But I do think when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that's one of those values we should work hard to defend.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  The Iliad: A New Translation

  Their words

  It's very readable, and captures a sense of what is, fundamentally, a very alien, and often ugly, story in a very alien, and often ugly, world, related in magnificent language.

  bactra.org

President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.

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  Federal efforts to restrict free expression in recent years were illegal and unconstitutional.

  Americagovernment

  Their words

  After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.

  The Inaugural Addresswhitehouse.gov

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

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  LLMs will push software development toward more specialized code, fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.

  LLMs

  Their words

  So I foresee a world with far more specialized code, with fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.

  How I program with LLMscrawshaw.io

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  Maya hieroglyphs must have been readable across several spoken languages, the way Chinese characters or Latin were.

  EuropeChina

  Their words

  There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.

  youtube.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Almost every one-to-one Telegram chat, and every group chat, is readable on Telegram’s own servers.

  Their words

  The practical impact is that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations — and literally every single group chat — are probably visible on Telegram’s servers, which can see and record the content of all messages sent between users.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

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  It is the party's censorship, not any lack of talent, that has made China a cultural underperformer beside Japan and South Korea.

  China

  Their words

  As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.

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  Refusing to advertise on a platform is protected expression, not an attack on the platform owner's free speech.

  Their words

  Elon Musk’s sullen yawp amounts to a claim that he has a right for companies to sponsor his speech, no matter what he says. That’s nonsense, both legally and philosophically.

  My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Uppopehat.substack.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Alberuni's India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030

  Their words

  It's mostly readable, though there are quite a few places where the translator calls for more research and this reprint, naturally, doesn't say whether it's been followed up *. In any event, I found this fascinating.

  bactra.org

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  The Linux Programming Interface

  Their words

  The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk – an exhaustive reference on how Linux works. There are about a million chapters, but every individual chapter is pretty short and I find it quite readable.

  jvns.ca

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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  Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

  Their words

  Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.

  fivebooks.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

From one piece Write plain text files 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Everything you write that matters belongs in plain text files, because they are the only format that stays portable, non-commercial and readable for a lifetime.

  Their words

  That's why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option.

  Write plain text filessive.rs

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  Plain text is the only format guaranteed to be readable on devices that do not exist yet.

  Their words

  Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

  Write plain text filessive.rs

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

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  LINQPad

  Their words

  A fantastic learning tool for those who are just getting into LINQ or for those who want a code snippet IDE to execute any C# or VB expression. Free and wonderful.

  hanselman.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  The Startup Owner's Manual

  Their words

  This is Steve Blank's textbook to starting a company. It's the Four Steps to the Epiphany, expanded and much more readable. If you want to deep dive into the Lean methodology, this is the book to read.

  jasonevanish.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  How to Read Lacan

  Their words

  Despite being very readable, this book never really came together.

  slatestarcodex.com

Art critic, broadcaster and author; wrote on art for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph and presents BBC art documentaries. Author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane.

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  Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston

  Their words

  This is a brilliant piece of social history. It's a daughter's expression of love for her father, even though it was a complicated love. I think it's a very memorable portrait of a particular painter. She relates his work to his life, to his fathering, and regrets the toll taken on him by the rather damaging macho culture of the male artists of the New York School, who seemed to have felt obliged to drink at least a bottle of whiskey and smoke five packets of Camel no-filter cigarettes every day. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did, given that he died in his mid-sixties.

  fivebooks.com

Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.

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  The Art of Readable Code

  Their words

  What I liked about this book is that it gives you a series of techniques to make that smell go away.

  fivebooks.com

Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.

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  On Liberty

  Their words

  I chose this book particularly because we are having a lively discussion about freedom of expression today. Some of the challenges to freedom of expression today come from the left rather than from the right, although some of them still do come from the right. In this context, Mill's arguments are still relevant and deserve to be more widely known and more widely thought about.

  fivebooks.com