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Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Carbon capture technology is worth continuing to research, even though it is not yet a solution to climate change.

  Their words

  It is entirely prudent to keep researching and testing carbon capture technology-someday it may be part of the solution to the greatest problem humanity has ever faced.

  Facts on the groundbillmckibben.substack.com

Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.

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  Forensic experts exposed as frauds, and the prosecutors who keep using them, face no consequences.

  Their words

  And while some courts have ruled that Hayne and West aren’t credible experts, the two men never faced any real accountability.

  The framing of Chris Duncanradleybalko.substack.com

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

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  Beijing drew its own conclusions from the first China shock and set out to engage the world economy from a position of technological leadership.

  China

  Their words

  It wasn’t just the West that drew conclusions from China shock 1.0. Beijing learned from China Shock 1.0 too.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

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  He reached the conclusion that input drives language acquisition on his own, before meeting the research that says so.

  Their words

  I came to the same conclusions independently before I encountered Krashen's work, and decades of learning across 20+ languages have only reinforced them. The research supports the intuition: input is where acquisition happens.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  Reproductive incompatibility between diverging human lineages grows roughly as the square of their separation time, because it takes pairs of interacting genes.

  Their words

  there's as populations become more apart, there begins to be biological incompatibilities rapidly developing, probably as the square of the distance separation, because you need pairs of interacting genes, and therefore it's the square of the separation.

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Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

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  Nothing in a fifty-year career has hit the industry with the magnitude of AI; it is a whole size difference from anything before it.

  Their words

  Well, nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. That's I mean, this is a a whole size difference from anything that we've faced before.

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Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.

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  If academic arguments can be dismissed for reaching politically unwelcome conclusions, there is no point in having academic arguments about politically charged subjects at all.

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  If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?

  betonit.ai

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  Changing societal outcomes requires changing minds, and the credibility many diverse co-authors lend to a conclusion is hard to replicate with AI.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Faced with a problem none of your techniques fit, try anything, the stupider the better, because the way it fails is the clue.

  Their words

  So the next step then is to try anything no matter how stupid and in fact almost the stupider, the better, which technically is almost guaranteed to fail, but the way it fails is going to be instructive.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Selfish Gene

  Their words

  At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do.

  paulgraham.com

Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

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  How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning

  Their words

  Recently I reviewed Adrian Kind’s 2025 book, “How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning,” on this substack. I had mentioned that Kind’s book is the first systematic, in-depth, book-length philosophical investigation into how psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions.

  psychiatrymargins.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Resisting the discomfort of not knowing leads people to jump to conclusions or decide before they have enough information.

  Their words

  When we resist not knowing, we often leap to conclusions, make decisions without all of the information, or simply guess. Of course, that might make it even more likely that we're wrong, the very thing our subconscious is trying to avoid. Needing to be right comes at the expense of curiosity.

  The Power of Not Knowingbringthedonuts.com

Former NASA flight director and space shuttle programme manager; writes about how the shuttle was actually flown and what went wrong.

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  Engineers will always ask for more data, so someone has to decide without certainty and own the risk to human life.

  Their words

  The engineers will always always always ask for more tests, more analysis, more time to get more information to be more certain of their conclusions.

  Flight Rationalewaynehale.wordpress.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

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  Assuming you are a typical observer in the universe is not humility but a hilariously presumptuous claim that typical observers are like you.

  Their words

  But then you draw some conclusions from this, and what you end up realizing is you’ve been hilariously presumptuous because by saying, “I’m a typical observer in the universe,” you’re saying, “Typical observers in the universe are like me,” and that is completely unjustified by anything.

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Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

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  Almost nobody makes a living from small-scale agroecological market gardening in a rich country, and there is a reason for that.

  Their words

  One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that.

  chrissmaje.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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  Modern prosperity does not refute Malthus: the Malthusian dilemma was faced, and one of Malthus’s own options was taken.

  Their words

  You thus can see that the prosperity of the modern world does not refute Malthus. We faced the Malthusian dilemma and opted for one of his options, namely vice.

  tylercowen.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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

  Their words

  Although his training is not in economics, Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions.

  fivebooks.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

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  Sex is not an option but a requirement: a large genome cannot be maintained by picking up loose DNA, so eukaryotes were forced into it.

  Their words

  If you’ve got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you’ve got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you’ve effectively got to be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else, and you’re still going to get the wrong DNA. You’ve got to pick up large chunks, and in the end, you’ve got to line them up, you’re forced into sex, to coin a phrase.

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Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

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  Counting every being that can suffer, and applying consistent moral weights, yields conclusions its own defenders find uncomfortable and cannot fully endorse.

  Their words

  Combining these three pillars yields a number of unusual, even uncomfortable views about ethics. I feel this discomfort and don't unreservedly endorse this approach to ethics.

  Future-proof ethicscold-takes.com