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The 2024 Reading List
It’s been a good reading year.
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Sweet Nothing : The Gospel According to Frank Bascombe
Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle.
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Saying is Believing : Authenticity, ‘Hypnosen,’ and the Startup Myth
Hypnosen is great fun, but it paints a picture of the startup circus I don’t fully agree with. Not all entrepreneurs are full of shit, and pitching isn’t just a spectator sport.
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Building the Good City : One Man’s Mission to Transform Gothenburg and Reinvent Urban Renewal
My dad’s PhD dissertation chronicle’s the life long struggle of an entrepreneur hell bent on making a dent in the universe. It’s a memoir masquerading as a thesis. It’s very inspriring and I’m happy I finally got around to reading it.
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Stockholm Swinging : A Love Affair with My Adopted City
A city is swinging when the people living in it feel that they’re making it what it is.
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How Not To (and Just Possibly How To) Build Peace in the Middle East
They say there’s a special type of peacefulness preceding storms. That felt true of the atmosphere in Israel and Palestine during the spring and summer of 2000.
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A Personal Journey Towards Extended Intelligence, or: Getting Intimate With Chet
I’ve come to allow “Chet” entry to my most private quarters.
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Talking Shop
Talking shop is fine, but integrating the wider world into your shop-talk is even better.
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The Curse of Completism : Confessions of a Compulsive Collector
Completism comes in many shapes and forms. It doesn’t necessarily have to manifest in a physical collection, but can also translate into a more generalised ambition to ‘take it all the way’.
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The Battle of the Elms and the End of Swedish Technocracy
The word ‘politics’ has no real meaning in a technocracy. All that counts is skilful execution of ideas, which in and of themselves were fundamentally self-evident.
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When the Robot Overlords Come to Take Your Job, This is What It’ll Sound Like
When doomers predict that AI will steal our jobs, we picture remote and futuristic scenarios. The real threat is mundane and it’s happening now, right before our noses.
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The 2023 Reading List
Reading. The ultimate unfair advantage.
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Getting Over Steve
The gospel of Jesus Christ was an exclusively male affair, but there are at least three female takes on Steve.
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The Innovative Stance
Ideation can only happen within a demarcated design space, and the inherent paradox there of course, is that you won’t know where to draw the lines of that space until you’ve developed a fair idea of what you’ll ideate about.
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We Need to Talk About Steve
My bromance with Steve goes back as far as I can remember. That’s probably why I felt such a severe case of cognitive dissonance when picking up Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ memoir Small Fry.