Recent Must Reads.
- The Cooler Me.
- Reality Check and Stunts. Gut-wrenching tales of startup life.
- The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret.
And the very good reads:
- What’s in a Name? Part 2. Part 3. Excellent highbrow essays by Errol Morris.
- Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.
- George Wright. Story about a man on the run from the FBI for 41 years.
- George Hotz, Sony, and the Anonymous Hacker Wars. By David Kushner.
- Valuing Art Through Its Theft.
- Earl Sweatshirt Is Back From the Wilderness.
- Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley?
- The Bravest Woman in Seattle.
Recent Good Reads.
- Stargate, Ester Dean, and the current pop-manufacturing landscape.
- Obama vs Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal? Fantastic insider information.
- Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses.
- Lobbyists, Guns, and Money.
- Nature vs Nurture: Nurture.
- How One Man Escaped from a North Korean Prison Camp. Amazing.
- On the Market. Behind the curtain at Sotheby’s. Sounds horrible.
- Sad Update on Antoine Walker.
- Not Sad Update on Penny Hardaway.
- The Man Who Broke Atlantic City.
Recent Good Reads.
- Africa’s Dirty Wars. A bit here on Kony’s LRA and the state-less rebels without a cause who are running amok through the continent.
- Inside the September 13th 2011 U.S. Embassy Attack in Kabul.
- The Mystery of the 18 Twitching Teenagers. Mass psychogenic illness reminds me of Chunk’s puking story in The Goonies.
- Lenny Dykstra. I’ve posted Dykstra’s crazy life story here before, but this may be his last chapter as he was just sentenced to 3 years at age 49 — he’s convinced he’ll be dead at 52 thanks to a fortune teller’s prognostication years ago. What an insane life story.
- The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. Short excerpt by David Kushner, who also wrote the excellent Masters of Doom.
- Apocalyptic London. By the talented China Mieville.
- I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave. Makes me rethink my Amazon Prime subscription.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted. Great story about Iraq’s top terrorist killer.
- How Companies Learn Your Secrets.
- Why French Parents are Superior.
- The End of Wall Street As They Knew It.
- Three Trials for Murder.
- An Oral History of the Malice at the Palace. Pultizer-worthy sports reporting about the dark day when
Ron ArtestMetta World Peace broke down and attacked Detroit’s fans. After reading this my perception of Jermaine O’Neal completely changed.
Some Recent Good Reads.
- A clear-eyed look back at Obama’s first term.
- Mass Incarceration in America.
- More, more, more condemnation of Scientology.
- Will Israel Attack Iran?, by an investigative reporter from Israel’s largest paper with access to the highest levels of Israeli government. TL;DR: Yes.
Do Sports Build Character or Damage It?
Philosopher-warrior inspection of the value of sports in society and how they relate in particular to a man’s psyche. Dude can WRITE.
Roger Williams profile.
Very interesting man I’d never heard of before today. He was the precursor to Thomas Jefferson and is largely responsible for the idea of separation of church and state.
Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut?
What’s old is new and what’s new is just a retread of the past two decades. Very interesting article from December’s Vanity Fair.
Solitude and Leadership.
Truly excellent and intellectual speech given to West Point students back in October 2009. As good as Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address. For real.
Recent Walter Isaacson follow-up interview to his Steve Jobs biography.
Goes deeper into Isaacson’s personal POV about Steve’s assholeishness and why he cried so much. Interesting addendum to the book.
What I’ve Been Reading the Past 2 Months.
Last one for 2011. Probably won’t do these big compilations next year and will instead rapidfire them out, one-by-one, as I come across the good ones.
I think long-form journalism is the only way out for news publishers given that the news cycle is a commodity. This year proves how much really good stuff is out there. On an unrelated note, I killed my Wired and Economist subscriptions this year. So maybe there is no way out except for the top of the Vanity Fair, New Yorker, n+1, etcetera-heap. Kinda sad.
- Todd Purdum on our National Security apparatus.
- Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of The World Bank, on how the banking system should serve society, not the other way around.
- Inside the Secret Service.
- Williams College’s Retired #50.
- Can the Bulldog Be Saved? TL;DR — No :(
- Hipster Bros Go To Tokyo. I’m a sucker for anything James Murphy.
- Homegrown Terror. On Najibullah Zazi’s conversion to radicalism and the close call the US had with his attempted NYC attack.
- The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.
- The Once and Future Way to Run. I now run quasi-barefoot. Fully converting next year.
- The Romney Economy. Photochop is kinda relevant.
- The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Great profile of Elizabeth Warren.
- Great profile of Bill Nguyen, the dude who founded Lala and the ill-fated Color. Sounds like a nightmare to work for.
