The Garden
Books, articles, papers, courses, videos, podcasts, and reports I have read, watched or listened to, with a note on each saying why I kept it.
Video
Gary Hustwit
A whole film about one typeface sounds like a stretch, and it kept me watching to the end. Designers disagree about whether Helvetica’s neutrality is its strength or the reason so much of the world looks the same. As someone who designs, I loved hearing them argue. You’ll start spotting it everywhere after.
Essay / Article
Mike Caulfield
My site has a Garden, and this keynote is where the idea of a digital garden comes from. Caulfield splits the web in two. The stream is your feed scrolling away, and the garden is a set of linked pages you keep tending. He asks us to build more gardens, and mine is my attempt at one.
Book
Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
I stayed with the Buendías for so long that I started to feel like one of them, and that’s how well it’s written. García Márquez tells the history of Latin America through that one family (keep a family tree handy), and the magical realism makes it amazing. It gets a bit depressing. There are funny moments along the way too.
Podcast
Mangesh Hattikudur
I started this show as a skeptic, and it moved me. Hattikudur set out to make a skeptical season about astrology, and his first interview changed his life. He talks to NASA employees and visits a shop in Tamil Nadu, and it ends up being about grief and family. A second season covers longevity science.
Report
Ryan Law, Ahrefs
This study backed up something I already believed, that writing only to rank is a risky plan. Across 300,000 keywords, the top result got about a third fewer clicks when Google showed an AI Overview. Nearly all of those were how-to and what-is searches, the kind most blogs are built on.
Video
Johnny Harris for Vox
I’m planning a piece on the history of world maps, and this is the video I’d show anyone first. Johnny Harris cuts open a plastic globe to show why every flat map has to stretch something. Mercator makes Greenland look as big as Africa, and Africa is about 14 times larger.
Book
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
Ambedkar wrote this as a speech in 1936, and his hosts canceled it after reading it. Ninety years later, it still reads like it was written for today. Caste, he writes, divides workers as well as work, and it lasts while the scriptures behind it keep their authority. I admire how clearly he makes that case.
Also Columbia’s annotated text (opens elsewhere) Verso edition (opens elsewhere)
Podcast
Robert Evans
Evans tells a guest the full story of one terrible person from history, usually across a few episodes. I keep thinking about how many ordinary people helped each of them rise. It gets dark in places, and the guest’s reactions make it easier to get through. It’s one of the funniest shows I listen to.
Paper
Arunesh Mathur and others
This paper gave my glossary the academic names for the tricks shopping sites play on you. The team crawled about 11,000 stores and found countdown timers that reset when you reload and low-stock alerts on a schedule. Many came from companies that sell them as add-ons, so if you build stores, check what your add-ons put on the page.
Essay / Article
Alexis Nosamudiana
I had this problem while rebuilding this site, since my work covers writing, design, and code. Alexis almost split hers into 5 portfolios, until her partner asked why she was hiding the most interesting thing about her. She organized everything around stories, so the range still looks like one person’s work.
Report
Patchstack
Its numbers went into my rtCamp piece on the WordPress ecosystem. Patchstack counted 7,966 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, and 96% of them were in plugins, with only 7 in core. So the security question for your site is which plugins you run and how fast you update them.
Podcast
Laurie Santos
Santos walks through what research says makes people happier, and a lot of it goes against instinct. Time with other people and small habits like gratitude do more than we expect, and the joy from a raise wears off faster than we think. It’s a calm listen, and it made me rethink a few of my own goals.