Tagged “essay”
218 pages · most loved first · page 5 of 10
On Spotify, music-as-a-service, and losing a favourite song
A Bitsy essay about owning the media you love and why streaming platforms have consequences, told through a small walkab…
On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Edsger Dijkstra's famous 1978 note arguing that formal notation exists for good reason, still much quoted in today's deb…
Philip K. Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
Philip K. Dick's celebrated essay on reality, fake worlds and what makes a universe hold together, a dizzying tour throu…
Playing in the Creek
A reflective personal essay on damming a backyard creek as a kid and how that kind of open-ended play shapes the way the…
Playing to Win
Alice Maz tells how she cornered the market on a Minecraft server, gaming its player economy with arbitrage, monopolies…
Pleasures by Aldous Huxley
A short 1920 essay by Aldous Huxley on the pleasures that civilization quietly depends on, free to read in a clean publi…
Poison, Poison Everywhere
An essay that opens with a high school teacher's wild story and goes on to explore the surprising history and prevalence…
Post-Futurism: The Age of the Hinge
An essay arguing that after a century of racing toward the future, the people who built it are walking away, leaving the…
Post-Ritual Space: Berghain
An architectural essay that walks through Berghain, the Berlin techno temple converted from a GDR power plant, examining…
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Programming Is Mostly Thinking
A short, widely loved essay arguing that the best programming days involve almost no typing, only careful thinking, and…
Programming Sucks
A cult-classic comic essay on why programming is a miserable and miraculous craft, with vivid analogies that non-program…
Quiver and Fixity
An essay by Jhumpa Lahiri on returning to Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure decades later and finding wells, ghosts, and t…
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
A classic short essay on how even simple tasks like building a staircase hide enormous unseen detail, and why that chang…
Repair and Remain
An essay on the temptation to flee difficulty in homes, marriages and careers, and the case for staying and doing the sl…
Roadside Attraction
An essay that starts with giant roadside oddities, from the Biggest Pistachio to restaurants shaped like hats, and wande…
Root for Your Friends
A short, sincere essay on why genuinely cheering for friends' successes improves your career, happiness and relationship…
Scrollbars are becoming a problem
A witty and thoughtful rant on how scrollbars have grown thinner, hidden, and harder to use, and why this small interfac…
Searching for the Self-Loathing Woman Writer
A long read asking whether famous women writers hated themselves or were writing about a world that hated them, weighing…
Should This Be a Map or 500 Maps?
A thoughtful essay on cartography about a map that never came to be, 500 priests, and why some places resist being flatt…
Silence Is a Commons
Ivan Illich's 1983 essay on how amplified speech and computers crowd out silence, and why quiet is a shared resource tha…
Simulation, Consciousness, Existence
Hans Moravec's 1998 essay on whether we might live in a simulation, mixing ideas about computation, mind and the nature…
Slow
Michael Nielsen collects problems that people can only solve over very long timescales and asks how to build institution…
Some Contemporary Heresies
Kevin Kelly lists the heresies he holds - beliefs that the people he most admires reject - in a short provocative essay…
Some Invalid Arguments Are More Bad Than Others
An essay proposing a formal way to score how flawed an invalid argument is, combining where the errors occur, whether th…
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