Recommended Reads
Deschooling Society: It seems like all my favorite theories wrote in the late 1960s and early
1970s: Rene Girard, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, and Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society is
a criticism of the education system. In the book, Illich argues that the institutionalization of
education strips us of our agency and leads to the institutionalization of society.
I, Pencil: A famous essay from 1958. It details the complexity of pencil production, from the
components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, pumice, wax, glue), to all the people involved,
down to the sweeper in the factory and the the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into
port. If you don’t want to read the essay, you can watch the 6-minute YouTube video.
Wendover Productions: I spend tons of time watching 8-15 minute YouTube documentaries.
They’re just long enough to keep me entertained during solo trips to fast-casual food outlets
like Chipotle and Sweetgreen, but short enough for me to watch the entire video in one
sitting. Minute-for-minute, I learn the most from Wendover Productions videos. I
recommend this video on the Panama Canal, this one on the economics of private jets, and
this one on how freight trains connect the world. If you’re interested in travel and
transportation, you’ll love these videos.
How Aristotle Invented the Computer: This essay traces the history of logic from Aristotle to
modern computing. It builds upon the early days of Euclid's elements and Claude Shannon's
work on information theory to show the history of logic. It ends with a look forward to neural
networks and machine learning.
ARPA, PARC, and The Dream Machine: An investigation into the problems with government
and bureaucracy. The essay builds upon the work of Philip Tetlock, early Silicon Valley
research labs, and the partnership between Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. If you like
what you read, I also recommend this YouTube talk by the author.
The Century of the Self: A documentary about how people in power have used Sigmund
Freud's theories to control and manipulate crowds. It discusses the relationship between
Freud and Edward Bernays, who was Freud's nephew and the founder of public relations. If
you're interested in advertising, narrative control, and crowd psychology, you will love this
documentary. Oh, and here's the full transcript.
David Perell Founder, Write of Passage
Reinventing Explanation: If you don't know who Michael Nielsen is, you're missing out. He's a
scientist by training and is one of the world's experts on quantum computing. Beyond that,
he has the curiosity of a polymath, so he's written about many other ideas. Reinventing
Explanation will give you a new way of thinking about communication and information
transfer. Specifically, the essay focuses on how we can use new media to create new types of
explanation. If you like the essay, you'll also enjoy my podcast with him.
How Do We Move the Needle on Progress?: Eli is my new favorite person to talk about
transportation. He matches passionate ambition with an educated understanding of what
levers we need to pull to advance human prosperity. This essay explores the four buckets of
progress that first-world countries should be focusing on: housing, healthcare, energy, and
transportation. You’ll walk away with lots of new ideas. Eli and I will be recording a podcast
together soon.
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable: I'll never get tired of watching this video. Bret Victor is
one of the most under-rated technologists in the world right now. He's at the frontier of a
discipline called "Tools for Thought." Media are our thinking tools. And our representations of
a system are how we understand it. Here, Victor focuses on designing new mediums for
science and engineering.
Why Too Much Evidence is Bad: Too much evidence can be a bad thing. Under ancient Jewish
law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was
acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed
that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial
process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned
that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made. Counter-
intuitive at first. But it makes sense.
How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?: It's official. This is the best essay I've ever read
about the Industrial Revolution. No event in human history has been more transformative.
This essay isn't just a series of historical facts and figures. It leads to findings that can
accelerate progress in the future.
David Perell Founder, Write of Passage
David Perell Founder, Write of Passage
