“Men seek retreats for themselves – in the country, by the sea, in the hills – and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning. But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease: and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life. So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself. The doctrines you will visit there should be few and fundamental, sufficient at one meeting to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin.”
9 Jul 2025 at 8:14 pm
Meditations (tr.Martin Hammond) (Penguin Classics)
Marcus Aurelius
“Will children born today experience as much change as children born a century ago”
27 May 2025 at 7:35 pm
Boom
Byrne Hobart
Tobias Huber
“This is justice, this is the law of the cosmos,” she wrote to employees. “If you rely on unfair means to seek illegal gains, you will eventually vomit back up what you ate—indeed, more than you ate.”
26 May 2025 at 8:25 pm
House of Huawei
Eva Dou
“Burnett had always been an aggressive salesman; in Dianne Burnett’s memoir, she describes her ex-husband upselling a client at Face so hard that the man had a seizure.”
18 May 2025 at 8:30 pm
Cue the Sun!
Emily Nussbaum
“If we let third parties project their preferred version of our reality onto our retinas, how can we sustain a common foundation of what we collectively believe about the world around us? And if we allow others direct access to our brains, how will we know where a thought originated and whether it’s truly ours?”
3 Apr 2025 at 7:11 pm
Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior
Sandra Matz
“Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste.”
15 Mar 2025 at 4:24 pm
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision
Fritjof Capra
“The reason why we sometimes want purely nonsensical things is that in our stupidity we see in those nonsensical things the easiest way to the attainment of some already proposed advantage.”
23 Feb 2025 at 3:56 pm
Notes from Underground and The Double
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Good product managers take written positions on important issues (competitive silver bullets, tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, and markets to attack or yield). Bad product managers voice their opinions verbally and lament that the “powers that be” won’t let it happen.”
19 Feb 2025 at 9:56 pm
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Horowitz, Ben
“Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
9 Feb 2025 at 9:35 pm
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Horowitz, Ben
“From the capitalist’s point of view, this working day is, of whatever length it turns out to be, divided into two parts. […] Part of the day is what’s called the necessary labor part of the day. That’s the part of the working day in which the worker reproduces his or her own cost, and for which he or she is paid through the wage. […] The other part of the working day, called the surplus labor part of the day, is the part in which the worker continues to produce goods or services, but for which she or he is not paid. This is the process that produces surplus value, and it’s the source of all of the capitalist’s profits.”
12 Jan 2025 at 8:02 pm
Consequences of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky
“It is also critical to point out that nothing enters our brains or minds unfiltered.”
30 Dec 2024 at 9:34 pm
Consequences of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky
“Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.”
30 Dec 2024 at 8:58 pm
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, not doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought.”
22 Dec 2024 at 7:56 pm
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.”
10 Nov 2024 at 9:44 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“Always thinking far ahead, his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now, but to transform the buyer’s very world, so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship.”
10 Nov 2024 at 9:26 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays
“What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?”
28 Aug 2024 at 9:38 PM
Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport
“UPF is not food, like a banana or a piece of chicken, but rather a separate category of addictive edible substance.”
18 Aug 2024 at 10:00 PM
Ultra-Processed People
Chris van Tulleken