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19 September
Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.
16 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people. We discuss: - The infamous Steve Jobs profile - Why Don Valentine hired him - The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people - Monomania and the cost of greatness - Why he has never felt… Google Related
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
15 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Making Worse at Shopify 19:46 Predictions: Where AI is Headed Next 21:55 The Future of AI-Powered Software 24:40 Will CEOs Be Replaced with AI? 27:54 Can Superintelligence Be Controlled? 31:13 Critical Skills in AI Age 34:22 Why Complex Solutions are Usually Wrong 36:33 Conditions Needed for True Intu… AI alignment Related
11 September
Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.
9 September
Forecaster, founder of FiveThirtyEight, author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. Writes Silver Bulletin, where the predictions come with numbers and the numbers are later checked against what happened.
8 September
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
Data shows that 80% of laughter has absolutely nothing to do with humor. It's a signal people use to say "I want to bond with you," not a reaction to something being funny. So if you want to instantly connect with anyone you meet: laugh with them. Here's how the Laughter Paradox works: Related
7 September
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
27 August
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
New Article: The Paradox of Burnout https://t.co/xBBp7UZiX9 What if caring deeply about your work can actually increase your risk of burnout? I explore the paradox in this article. Related
14 August
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
Their words
which is why I think like a simple drawing of a pencil can stand for writing in some ways better than a chrome pen with a reflection, which is real very fancy, but it's a very particular kind of pen that not everybody might write with.
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8 August
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
Their words
you can be a great writer, revealing possibilities that others haven't seen, without always being a good one.
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programmablemutter.com
5 August
Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.
23 July
Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group; wrote Inspired, Empowered and Transformed on how product organisations work.
The AI Productivity Paradox We’ve been writing a lot lately about product teams that are clearly leveraging AI to deliver faster, yet their outcomes are not improving. Today, this phenomenon, known as the “AI Productivity Paradox,” has been recogn…
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Founder and CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo, and co-author of the books Traction and Super Thinking.
Resolving the privacy paradox gabrielweinberg.com/p/resolving-... Revealed preference arguments often have hidden flaws Related
5 July
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
29 June
Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.
19 May
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
3 May
Cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute; writes Ground Truths on biomedical research, and wrote Super Agers and Deep Medicine.
1 May
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.
8 April
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words, before
It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak.
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Their words now
So, I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden days.
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3 March
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
Notes on the Fermi Paradox I recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note. The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question…
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2 March
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
Polyvagal theory
Their words
Polyvagal theory provided me with a coherent framework for understanding why cognitive insight alone often fails when a nervous system is in defensive dominance. In such states, higher-order cortical processes are functionally constrained.
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drarielleschwartz.com
18 January
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
Their words
Revealing by behavioral scientist Leslie John (February)
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adamgrant.substack.com
14 December 2025
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
11 October 2025
Founder and CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo, and co-author of the books Traction and Super Thinking.
🆕✍️ The paradox of progress gabrielweinberg.com/p/the-parado... If progress = rising living standards, why doesn’t a progress agenda command top billing in U.S. politics? • Timescale mismatch. • Change aversion. • Lacking urgency. America Related
5 October 2025
Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.
From one piece
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Then you need a metag game, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard, achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation uh to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's a reflection of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long-term learning journey that can be quite successful.
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youtube.com
Their words
and so I think this is interesting just modernization learning that especially if you work on a premium product try to have your free product be a reflection of like everything that your product can offer you. Obviously, to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay it for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward um and go do that.
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12 September 2025
Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.
Their words
But the reason why it's not the most important thing for the kind of skills that you saw when you visited us, it at some level I think it comes back to Moravik's paradox. So Morovik's paradox is basically that it's like you know if you know one thing about if you want to know one thing about robotics it's like that's that's the thing. Morovik's paradox says that basically uh in AI the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy.
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7 September 2025
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
Some games are just harder to design than others. Eg A Paradox-style grand strategy game requires much more design ability to do well than an action platformer. More interacting systems, more situations to think about, longer play times and thus scarcer test feedback. Related
29 August 2025
Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.
19 August 2025
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
Just One More Prompt Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a Claudoholic. A reflection on AI addiction, extreme work culture, and the blurry line between productivity and obsession in the age of agentic engineering.
Addiction Related
23 May 2025
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.
12 May 2025
Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate reset Two weeks ago (timed to come out just before the UK local elections), Tony Blair released a report calling for the climate movement to change tack. He’s right – and also very, very wrong. The Climate Paradox: Why We Nee…
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5 May 2025
Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.
From one piece
Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I’m unhappy with that. I would not be happy with information loss. I love that it’s telling us that there’s this crisis because I do think it’s giving us the clues, and we have to take them seriously.
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youtube.com
Their words
I’m going back to the vacuum. The empty space, the beautiful event horizon I’ll give up locality, meaning that I will allow things to be connected non-locally by a wormhole.
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21 March 2025
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
Their words
A short but powerful reflection from post-WWII Germany on 'true leisure' not mere relaxation or entertainment—is fundamental to human flourishing and the foundation of a meaningful life and culture.
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pathlesspath.com
Their words
Part memoir, part raw, honest reflection, part useful ideas for a pathless life. I loved how this book didn't follow a non-fiction formula. His 'on-season'/'off-season' approach was useful for me.
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pathlesspath.com
10 February 2025
Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.
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