Here are a few reads that I enjoyed this year on a variety of topics (tech, business, environment, society, etc) including articles, blog posts and longer more in-depth reads. Hope you’ll find them interesting too!
Tech & Business
DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence: Demis Hassabis founded a company to build the world's most powerful AI. Then Google bought him out. Hal Hodson asks who…
Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages: In 1886, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans came across an ancient stone bearing a curious set of inscriptions in…
Exclusive: Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard talks about the sustainability myth, the problem with…: "You want the truth? It's hopeless. It's completely hopeless." That's what Patagonia founder and chairman Yvon…
What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business: Create strong culture, stay laser-focused on problems, and set wildly ambitious goals
We aren’t thinking weird enough: What the great flip means for us
Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, For a Price (Published 2019): A decade ago, an internet video start-up called Hulu boldly declared an end to the era of paid TV. The company…
Alienated, Alone And Angry: What the Digital Revolution Really Did To Us: In April 1997, Wired magazine published a feature with the grand and regrettable title "Birth of a Digital Nation." It…
Environment
Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different: Environmentalist Bill McKibben imagines what would happen if we “solved” climate change by 2050. Here’s what the world…
If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home? (Published 2019): In the age of global warming, traveling - by plane, boat or car -is a fraught choice. And yet the world beckons. The…
Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an 'Unprecedented' Pace (Published…: Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. WASHINGTON - Humans are…
Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers: Food is produced and processed by millions of farmers and intermediaries globally, with substantial associated…
Greta Thunberg: 'They see us as a threat because we're having an impact': reta Thunberg. This time last year she was unimaginable. Then, pretty much from nowhere, there she was: small and…
'You idiots ... The planet's on f--ing fire!' Bill Nye's message to leaders stalling on climate…: 'Grow the f--k up. You're not children anymore. I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12. But…
Développement écoresponsable: la petite révolution de Bolton-Ouest: L'homme d'affaires montréalais Pierre Boivin, président de Claridge, et plus de 40 autres personnes, dont plusieurs…
Notre part des déchets: Des rivières de plastique en Corée du Sud, des montagnes de bouteilles d'eau dans la pampa argentine et de longues…
Society & Philosophy
My Restaurant Was the Greatest Show of Excess You'd Ever Seen, and It Almost Killed Me: A couple weeks ago I interviewed the chef-owners of Joe Beef, David McMillan and Fred Morin, at Books Are Magic in…
Having Kids: December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young…
Lâcher prise devant l'inconnu: Photo: Thierry du Bois Lâcher-prise sensuel avec Céline Cassone et Alexander Hille dans "Dance Me". Flirter avec…