words i love

an evolving collection of words + articles + books I love, by topic:

💫 for all-time favorite / 🌸 for emotional resonance / 🔍 for provoking thought

fiction

• The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, Ken Liu

• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu 💫
• The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng 🌸
• The Stranger, Albert Camus 🔍

• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

• Department of Speculation, Jenny Offill 🌸



cities

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs 🔍

• “Crawling the City,” Will Payne 🔍
• “How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists,” Kim-Mai Cutler



education

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire 🔍
• “The Organization Kid,” David Brooks



feminism

• Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino

• “Woven: A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” Seo-Young Chu 🌸

• “Why Women Still Can't Have It All," Anne-Marie Slaughter 🔍

• “Hideous Men," E. Jean Carroll



food

• “In Bad Taste," John Birdsall

• “You've Probably Never Had Real Soy Sauce," Wei Tchou

• “Crying in H Mart,” Michelle Zauner



internet

• Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

• “How do you describe TikTok?," Kyle Chayka

• “De-Escalating Social Media," Nick Punt 🔍



labor

• “Spadework," Alyssa Battistoni 💫

• “Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon,” Jacobin
• “The Price of Nice Nails,” Sarah Maslin Nir



health / care

• The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang

• “How Many Have Died?", S. Andrew Schroeder 🔍



media

• Breaking News, Alan Rusbridger 🔍

• “Among the Believers," A.o. Scott

politics

• Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek 💫

• The Democratic Paradox, Chantal Mouffe 🔍

• The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority, Martin Gurri 🔍

• Dark Money, Jane Mayer 🔍

• “Contest of Words," Ben Lerner 💫



race

• Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong 💫

• The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr. 💫

• The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe 🔍

• Between The World And Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 💫

• “Passionate Irreverence: The Cultural Politics of Identity," Coco Fusco 🔍

• “Occidentalism," Sally Wen Mao



self-help-ish

• The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker

• How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell 🔍

• “The Duolingo Owl," Helena Fitzgerald

• “The Charisma of Leaders," Mills Baker

• “Even if you beat me," Sally Rooney 💫



sociology

• Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott 💫

• From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner 🔍

• Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis 🔍

• Educated, Tara Westover 💫

• Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci 🔍

• “Squad Wealth," Other Internet

• “Going Critical," Kevin Simler



startups

• No Filter, Sarah Frier

• Zero to One, Peter Thiel 🔍
• Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
• “Before the Startup,” Paul Graham
• “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener 💫



tech

• The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan 💫

• What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub 🔍

• AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee

• “Disruption: A Manifesto," Logic Magazine

• “Unrequited Love Song for the Panopticon," Franny Choi 🌸

• “AI Safety Needs Social Scientists,” OpenAI 🔍
• “The Threat of Algocracy," John Danaher 🔍

(last updated: may 8, 2021)