My favorite longform content

Books, movies, TV (mostly Sci-Fi and nonfiction)

Books

I limited this list to books that are Very Good. Many of the authors have other books I’ve enjoyed.

Science Fiction

The Culture series, Iain M. Banks

Jean le Flambeur trilogy, Hannu Rajaniemi

The Dispossessed, U. K. le Guin

The Foundation series, Issac Asimov

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson

The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson

Dark Matter, Blake Crouch

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams

1984, George Orwell

The Man in the Empty Suit, Sean Ferrell

Rant the Oral Biography of Buster Casey, Chuck Palahniuk

Permutation City, Greg Egan

Diaspora, Greg Egan

There is no Antimemetics Division, qntm

Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Economics

Poor Economics, Duflo and Banerjee

Good Economics for Hard Times, Duflo and Banerjee

Radical Markets, Glen Weyl

More Sex is Safer Sex, Steven Landsburg

Can You Outsmart an Economist?, Steven Landsburg

Handbook of Utility Theory Volume 1 and 2

The Age of Em, Robin Hanson

Freakonomics Series, Levitt and Dubner

Policy

Open Borders, Caplan and Weinersmith

Against Democracy, Jason Brennan

Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman

The Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics,

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith

High Price, Carl Hart

Other

The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris

Natural Justice, Ken Binmore

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Russel and Norvig

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, Rebecca Goldstein

Algorithmic Game Theory, multiple authors

How to Measure Anything, Douglas Hubbard

Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier (Don’t use this for actual cryptography, just a fun introduction to the field)

Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Kingkiller Chronicle, Patrick Rothfuss

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques, Michael Michalko

Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman

Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Scott Aaronson

The 4 Hour Body, Tim Ferriss

Outlive, Peter Attia

All of Statistics, Larry Wasserman

Large Sample Covariance Matrices and High-Dimensional Data Analysis, Jianfeng Yao, Shurong Zheng, Zhidong Bai

IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, John Drury Clark

Into the Wild, John Krakauer

Napoleon’s Buttons, Penny Le Couteur

Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Waterson

Honorable mention

The Golden Oecumene trilogy, John C. Wright

Sync, Steven Strogatz

Wicked Plants, Amy Stewart

Free to Move, Ilya Somin

Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod

Polystate, Zach Weinersmith

50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, Tim Harford

Economics in One Lesson, Hazlit

Accelerando, Charles Stross

Aristoi, Walter Jon Williams

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Unsong, Scott Alexander

Plato at the Googleplex, Rebecca Goldstein

Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling

Megastructures: The Visual Encyclopedia, Neil Blevins

Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Simple Rules for a Complex World, Richard Epstein

Movies

Sci-Fi

I mostly like SF that is either highly-visual or that promotes vibes I approve of.

• Dune

• Akira

• Star Trek Series

• Big hero 6

• Terminator Series

• Ghost in the Shell

• Annihilation

• Primer

• Cloud Atlas

• Tenet

• Inception

• Blade Runner Series

• Ready Player One

• Free Guy

• Gattaca

• 12 Monkeys

• Looper

• Ex Machina

• 2067

• Total Recall

• Oblivion

• Limitless

• Elysium

• Predestination

• Arrival

• Her

• Minority Report

• Tron: Legacy

• Black Panther

• Iron Man

• District 9

• Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

• V for Vendetta

• Tomorrowland

• Hotel Artemis

• Source Code

• The Matrix Series

• Enders Game

• Transendence

• Surrogates

• Passengers

• I, Robot

• Children of Men

• Upgrade

• Everything Everywhere All at Once

• Zoë (2018)

• Lightyear

• Molli and Max in the Future

• Mars Express

• Arco

Not Sci-Fi

• John Wick

• Die Hard

• Love, Actually

• Hunt for the Wilderpeople

• The Birdcage

• Master and Commander

• Molly’s Game

• 8 Mile

• Once

• The Big Sick

• Fight Club

• Catch Me If You Can

• My Cousin Vinnie

• The Sting

• Seven Psychopaths

• Oldboy

• Pirates of the Caribbean

• A Beautiful Mind

• Into the Wild (the book is good too)

• Yes Man

• Midnight in Paris

• Princess Bride

• Donnie Darko

• Oceans 11

• The Italian Job

• Indiana Jones

• The Bourne Identity

• Challengers

• I Heart Huckabees

• Other movies by Christopher Nolan, Stephen Spielberg, and Dennis Villevenue

TV

Sci-fi

• Altered Carbon

• Counterpart

• The Expanse

• Rick and Morty

• Psychopass

• Upload

• Futurama

• Stranger Things

• Foundation

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

• The 3 body problem

• The Peripheral

• Bodies (Netflix)

• Pantheon

Not Sci-Fi

I don’t watch much non-SF TV.

• Our Flag Means Death

• The Bear

• 30 Rock

• Parks and Rec

• Killing Eve

• Ted Lasso

Musicals

• Rocky Horror picture show (you have to go to a live show)

• Wicked (the musical, I haven’t seen the movie)

• Hamilton