We’re now well over half a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, and the lack of a vaccine is excruciating. With dozens of candidate vaccines generating countless headlines about positive results in early stage trials, it’s tempting to see any further delay as unnecessary. If we know that these …
A common mistake that has become more common recently is treating graphs as indisputable facts. The truth is far messier: any data visualization is the product of numerous subjective decisions. An informed reader should be able to identify these decisions and understand their impact. Charts should be approached with the …
The coronavirus pandemic is the first data-driven crisis. The key numbers – infections and deaths – are easily understood, widely available, and constantly changing. As a result, the outbreak has led to more charts, graphs, comparisons, and projections than any event in history. While data should be at the heart of any …
Last year, I wrote a piece called “Thirty Books I Want to Read Before I Turn Thirty.” The somewhat eclectic list actually consisted of twenty-four books, with empty slots left to add six more as the year went on. Roughly two-thirds of the books were well-known classics, while the remainder …
James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” is a fascinating account of how centralization schemes fail. The book’s title follows from a simple observation: centralized administrators need legibility to function. A state can’t collect taxes unless it knows who its citizens are and how much income they’re …
Ben Thompson's characteristically excellent article this week focuses on how Google has forced online travel agencies (like Expedia) to pay for traffic by prioritizing ads and pushing organic results further down the page. Part of this is clear product improvements, like a paid-inclusion hotel module that's useful to users while …
One of the top posts on Hacker News yesterday made the point that stock options aren't a great deal for startup employees these days. That thesis is entirely correct and is quickly becoming conventional wisdom around Palo Alto. But I raised my eyebrows at the article's description of the cause …
The Vietnam War is foreign to me. My father was far too young to be drafted, as he was in elementary school when the war ended. By the time I was that age, Vietnam had opened itself to foreign tourists. To my generation of Americans, Vietnam is an exotic vacation …
This book convincingly demonstrates that we humans constantly deceive others and ourselves alike in the service of our own selfish motives. What's less clear is what implications follow from that.
The book is divided into two sections. The first lays out the immense array of ways in which humans are …
Each winter morning, hordes of parka-clad addicts descend on the ski resorts that dot the mountains of the western US. They share one goal: allocating their time to maximize stoke levels at the moment they return to the lodge. The skiers employ a wide range of strategies to optimize these …