Shelf

Emily Anthes's 2020 book on how the design of indoor spaces shapes human health, behavior, and wellbeing.

Shannon Mattern's 2017 Places Journal essay arguing that urban intelligence encompasses forms of knowledge that resist algorithmic reduction.

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's 1999 MIT Press study of classification systems — medical codes, nursing classifications, apartheid racial categories.

Abby Covert's 2014 accessible introduction to information architecture.

Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book-length meditation on translation, using dozens of English versions of a single Clément Marot poem.

2x2s – loved by postrats & epidemiologists alike

a cybernetics room in Santiago

Kees Dorst's 2015 MIT Press study of 'frame creation' — not generating solutions but redefining what the problem is.

Benedict Evans's 2021 essay on Virgil Abloh's design language — the 3% rule, the readymade, the quotation mark.

Batya Friedman and David Hendry's 2019 MIT Press methodological guide — seventeen methods for integrating human values into technology design.

The Situationist International's technique of hijacking existing cultural materials and rerouting their meaning, articulated in Debord and Wolman's 1956 'A User's Guide to Détournement.'

Dietmar Offenhuber's 2023 MIT Press argument that data is material rather than abstract, proposing 'autographic design' built on traces and self-inscriptions.

Realpolitik for designers

Lauren Weinstein and Nicole Anand on how design practices are absorbed — or fail to be absorbed — into complex social systems.

you're already designing – the question is whether you notice

Eduardo Kohn's 2013 ethnography of the Runa of Ecuador's Upper Amazon, arguing that all life — not just human life — is semiotic.

Robert Michael Pyle's essay on the compounding cycle by which disconnection from nature breeds indifference that accelerates further habitat loss.

Robert Sapolsky's 2017 synthesis working backward from the second before an action through hormones, development, culture, and evolution.

Roy Bhaskar's Journal of Critical Realism article on critical realist ontology and the understanding of persons.

Jonathan Glover's 1999 moral history examining how ordinary moral psychology breaks down in atrocities from WWI to Rwanda.

Stephen Toulmin's 1988 American Scholar essay arguing for a recovery of context-sensitive practical wisdom alongside formal method.

Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra in Aeon (2024) examining why expanding moral circles reliably triggers irritation.

Anagram's 2021 VR experience narrated by Tilda Swinton about a man who found connection through online multiplayer games; Venice Grand Jury Prize winner.

Anagram's mixed reality experience narrated by Tilda Swinton exploring ADHD through first-person accounts and gameplay.

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts's 2022 durational VR experience set in the Daintree Rainforest, unfolding over 24 hours.

Jon Bois's 2017 multimedia fiction on SB Nation, set in a far future where humans no longer die and football games last millennia, told through scrolling web pages and YouTube.

Janet Cardiff's 2001 sound installation — Thomas Tallis's forty-part motet through forty loudspeakers in an oval, one voice per speaker.

Marshmallow Laser Feast's VR work following oxygen through the body to a single cell, exec produced by Terrence Malick, voice by Cate Blanchett, music by Jonny Greenwood.

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 die-cut book created by excising words from Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles.

Sam Green's 2022 live documentary performed with JD Samson and headphones for each audience member, weaving thirty-two auditory encounters.

2016 VR experience built from John Hull's audio diaries recorded as he lost his sight, using binaural sound and real-time 3D animation.

Eliza McNitt's 2018 three-part VR series produced by Darren Aronofsky, narrated by Millie Bobby Brown, Patti Smith, and Jessica Chastain.

David OReilly's 2017 simulation in which every object in the universe is playable, narrated by Alan Watts; first video game screened at the Vienna International Film Festival.

Jason Rohrer's 2007 five-minute game compressing an entire human life; one of the first video games acquired by MoMA.

you read it by tapping

Robin Sloan's tap essay about the future of reading.

Radúz Činčera's 1967 interactive film at Expo 67 in Montreal — audience voted at nine branch points; the first interactive cinema.

Christopher Gilbert's 1991 Yale UP survey — the first comprehensive scholarly study of English vernacular furniture from 1750 to 1900.

Regional Furniture Society anthology of Christopher Gilbert's articles and exhibition catalogues from 1966 to 1998.

A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.

Virginia Postrel's 2020 history of textiles as a driver of economic, technological, and cultural development.

build the chest first

Florence Nightingale David's 1962 history of probability and statistics from antiquity to Newton.

Jesse David Fox's 2023 account of how comedy became the dominant cultural form of the early 21st century.

Ryan and Amy Green's 2016 autobiographical game tracing their son Joel's fight against cancer through poetic vignettes.

Johan Huizinga's 1938 study of play as a foundational element of culture.

Keith Johnstone's 1979 manual on improvisation — status, spontaneity, narrative, and mask work.

Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich's 2019 book on how public health campaigns generate stigma that undermines the health outcomes they pursue.

Julio Frenk and Octavio Gómez-Dantés's 2016 Lancet paper arguing that global health is hampered by false either/or choices.

Koch and Weingart's fieldwork in South Africa and Tanzania arguing that power imbalances make 'knowledge transfer' a structural delusion.

all NGOs are media companies

Liisa Malkki's 1996 article on how humanitarian discourse renders refugees voiceless — treating wounded bodies as evidence while suppressing narrative authority.

An Xiao Mina on how expertise creates narrow viewpoints on complex problems.

magic bullets, every time

Gilbert Rist's 1997 book tracing the concept of 'development' from its Western origins, arguing it functions as a collective belief system that expands market relations.

Mark Schuller's 2012 ethnography of two Haitian women's NGOs showing how USAID funding imposes 'trickle-down imperialism.'

Alex de Waal's 1997 argument that famines in Africa are political events caused by failures of accountability, and that international relief often obstructs democratic solutions.

Brian Larkin's 2013 Annual Review of Anthropology essay arguing that infrastructures function not only technically but aesthetically and politically.

not every road should be repaired

who gets to fix what

a bear on a bicycle

Sarah Kaplan's 2011 Organization Science paper showing how PowerPoint shapes strategy-making inside firms.

Robles-Anderson and Svensson's 2016 paper tracing how PowerPoint has homogenized disparate occasions for speech into a single presentational form.

why are you clicking

zoom in, zoom out, keep going

Bret Victor's 2014 keynote arguing that static, symbol-based representations cripple human cognition, calling for dynamic, embodied media.

Bret Victor's public reference archive — papers spanning mathematics, cognitive science, design, and computing.

Alastair Benn's essay arguing that the costs of excessive literacy become visible only to the hyper-literate themselves.

Nathan Caplan's 1979 paper proposing that social scientists and policymakers inhabit separate worlds with different values and language.

Kaidi Wu and David Dunning on hypocognition — lacking conceptual vocabulary to perceive, name, or reason about a phenomenon.

Sam Kriss's 2025 NYT Magazine essay on the feedback loop in which humans increasingly mimic AI language patterns.

Essay arguing that meaningful change happens primarily in small, trust-based circles and that scale obsession undermines the relational conditions that make change possible.

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy's 2024 Harvard UP critique of digital capitalism as continuous ranking and scoring of individuals.

the "science" of scaling

Mariana Mazzucato's 2018 argument that modern capitalism has lost the ability to distinguish value creation from value extraction.

Jerry Muller's 2018 diagnosis of 'metric fixation' in schools, hospitals, police forces, and corporations.

Jana Bacevic's 2024 essay in the British Journal of Sociology arguing that explanation and critique are not opposing orientations in social science.

the case against physics envy

Donna Haraway's 1988 Feminist Studies essay arguing that all knowledge claims are made from specific bodily and social locations.

Kieran Healy's practical guide for social scientists arguing for plain-text workflows — text editors, R, Markdown, Pandoc, and version control.

Nancy Krieger's 2005 paper defining the key terms of her ecosocial framework — embodiment, pathways, cumulative interplay.

Nancy Krieger's ecosocial theory of disease distribution, arguing that health inequities are embodied expressions of social conditions.

Bruno Latour's 2004 Critical Inquiry essay arguing that critique has exhausted itself by debunking facts, proposing a shift from matters of fact to matters of concern.

Brian Earp's 2016 essay applying Brandolini's Law to scientific publishing.

Hirokazu Miyazaki's 2004 Stanford UP ethnography arguing that hope is not merely a sentiment but an active method of inquiry.

Henry Richardson's 2000 paper arguing that cost-benefit analysis cannot accommodate the refashioning of ends in light of new information.

Karl Weick's 1995 ASQ essay distinguishing theory from theorizing — the ongoing, necessarily incomplete process of approximation.

Berger-Tal et al.'s 2014 PLOS ONE multidisciplinary framework for the exploration-exploitation tradeoff.

Fred Brooks's 1975 essays on software engineering, drawing on his experience managing IBM's OS/360.

[DRAFT — replace] Bullshit is a ubiquitous communication practice that permeates many dimensions of organizational life. This essay outlines different understandings of bullshit and discusses their significance in the context of organization studies.

Can Duruk's essay modeling workplace attention to show mathematically why deep focus is near-impossible under typical office conditions.

Adam Elkus's 2017 Ribbonfarm essay on the paradox that individuals and institutions consistently perform poorly at the strategic planning they culturally value.

development as depoliticization

Gould and Fernandez's 1989 formal typology of five brokerage roles — coordinator, gatekeeper, representative, consultant, and liaison.

Francis Heylighen's 2016 paper defining stigmergy — indirect coordination in which traces left by one action stimulate subsequent actions — in ant colonies, Wikipedia, open-source software, and cities.

the collective desirable

Moch and Pondy's chapter in March and Olsen's 1976 Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, analyzing organized anarchy as a functional response to ambiguity.

Jennifer and Zachary Neal's 2021 systematic review surveying 277 sources to clarify how 'broker,' 'intermediary,' and 'boundary spanner' differ.

Nonaka and Takeuchi's 1995 study of how Japanese companies achieve innovation through systematic conversion between tacit and explicit knowledge.

André Spicer on how hollow management jargon has colonized schools, NGOs, politics, and media.

[DRAFT — replace] Why is bullshit so common in some organizations? Existing explanations focus on the characteristics of bullshitters, the nature of the audience, and social structural factors which encourage bullshitting.

Clay Spinuzzi's 2003 MIT Press ethnography of how workers improvise unofficial genres — notes, annotations, workarounds — alongside designed information systems.

Matthew Stewart's 2006 Atlantic essay by an Oxford philosopher turned consultant, arguing that management theory is mostly inane.

Yochai Benkler's 2006 argument that networked technologies enable peer-based, non-market social production.

Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser's 2018 Duke UP collection examining how indigenous knowledge practices constitute genuinely different worlds, not different perspectives on one world.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 1996 study based on interviews with 91 creative individuals examining flow states and creative contribution.

Frantz Fanon's 1952 psychoanalytic study of colonialism's psychological effects on Black identity.

Joel F. Harrington's 2013 history of Meister Frantz Schmidt, Nuremberg's executioner for over forty years, reconstructed from his personal journal.

Research reporting that multi-day mass gatherings like Burning Man produce transformative experiences that persist at least six months.

Austin Kleon's 2014 manifesto arguing that sharing your process — not just finished work — is how creative people find their audience.

Pennycook and Cheyne's 2015 paper defining and empirically studying 'pseudo-profound bullshit' — syntactically coherent statements that sound meaningful but are empty.

Maria Popova's essay using Ernest Becker's paradox — divine cognition in a mortal, animal body.

Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, and Sripada's argument that the defining human capacity is prospection — simulating and evaluating futures — not memory.

Amartya Sen's 2005 essay collection arguing that India's tradition of public reasoning and argumentative culture is a democratic resource.

Charles Taylor's 2004 account of the social imaginary — the shared background understanding through which people imagine their collective life.

Viviana Zelizer's 1994 sociological study showing that people systematically 'earmark' money — challenging the assumption that money is fungible.

distinctly computer-oriented, male, American, middle-class

replace algorithm with God and ask if the meaning changes

how do you get the sacred without violence

Clare Coffey's 2023 New Atlantis essay on a 'postrationalist turn' among online communities toward religion and skepticism of quantified approaches to the good life.

Greg Epstein's 2024 MIT Press argument that technology has become the dominant faith of the 21st century, calling for critical tech agnosticism.

Alexis Madrigal's 2013 Atlantic essay on slot machines and social media inducing the same trancelike 'machine zone,' drawing on Natasha Dow Schüll's research.

Venkatesh Rao's 2012 Ribbonfarm essay introducing the 'Manufactured Normalcy Field.'

Karel Čapek's 1920 play that introduced the word 'robot.'

Michael Hiltzik's 1999 account of Xerox PARC — the personal computer, laser printer, Ethernet, and graphical interface, and Xerox's failure to commercialize them.

what if technology is not universal?

Lynn White Jr.'s 1962 argument that medieval technological innovations drove the social transformations of feudal Europe.

the internet arrived, the politics didn't change

Jack Linchuan Qiu's 2009 MIT Press book on how low-cost mobile phones and internet cafés enabled a working-class network society among China's urban migrants.

innovation is a word that has been stripped of meaning through overuse

41 questions, no answers

Special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science examining cognitive technologies — maps, taxonomies, writing systems — as socially shared tools whose histories illuminate how humans extend cognition.

Lee Vinsel's essay critiquing the d.school and design thinking as evidence-free management fad.

M. Mitchell Waldrop's 2001 biography of J.C.R. Licklider, the ARPA psychologist whose vision of 'man-computer symbiosis' seeded the internet and personal computing.

Langdon Winner's 1980 Daedalus essay using Robert Moses's low-clearance bridges as a canonical example.

exactly what it sounds like

Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend.

Neil Postman was right. So what?

photography arrived in India, Japan, and West Africa not as a copy of European practice but as something else entirely

Ariella Azoulay's 2012 Verso book proposing a 'political ontology of photography' in which photographs can reconstruct the civil relations that made them possible.

Ariella Azoulay's 2008 argument that photography constitutes a civil contract: anyone depicted becomes a member of a 'citizenry of photography' with mutual obligations.

Roland Barthes's 1980 meditation on photography, grief, and what he calls the noeme of the photograph — 'that-has-been.'

Stephen Heath's 1977 selection of Barthes essays including 'The Death of the Author,' 'Rhetoric of the Image,' and 'The Grain of the Voice.'

Geoff Dyer–edited selection of John Berger's essays on photography, ranging across 40 years.

E.H. Gombrich's 1960 study arguing that artists work through inherited schemata — conventional forms that constrain and guide perception.

Nelson Goodman's 1968 analytic philosophy of art arguing that artworks are symbolic systems whose function is not to resemble reality but to denote, express, or exemplify.

Susie Linfield's 2010 defense of looking at photographs of political violence — arguing against Sontag and the postmoderns.

Fred Ritchin's 2013 Aperture book on photojournalism in the digital era.

Susan Sontag's 2003 examination of war photography and the ethics of spectatorship.

Neal Agarwal's interactive visualization comparing sizes of living things from DNA to the Pando aspen clone.

hyperlink archaeologist

a social network made of personal websites

Hand-curated visual map of the websites and web places the creator actually inhabits.

Barry Smith's 2013 satirical website demonstrating that unstyled HTML with readable text is already a functional, responsive, accessible website.

800 websites printed on yellow pages

the people behind the URLs