A Few Good Reads (2025 Edition)

Some interesting bookmarks from around the Internet this year.

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!

Business

Brian Chesky Lost His Mind One Night-and Now He's Relaunching Airbnb as an Everything App: Airbnb's CEO is spending hundreds of millions to relaunch his travel company as an all-purpose service app. Fitness…

The New World: Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream [Colossus]

Inside Cursor [Colossus]

The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI [WSJ]

Now Wanted in Silicon Valley: Ho-Hum Businesses With Thin Profit Margins [WSJ]

How Google Finally Leapfrogged Rivals With New Gemini Rollout [WSJ]

Why YC and Speedrun feel more like universities than funds [Betakit]

Tech

Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online: Sesame's new AI voice model features uncanny imperfections, and it's willing to act like an angry boss.

How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI: When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a…

Stripe's Tempo And The Ghost Of Facebook's Libra's Past: Libra is crypto's favorite ghost story. Stripe is betting the sequel, called Tempo, has a happier ending.

Toronto Is Not the Next Silicon Valley - And That's a Good Thing: Toronto isn't the next Silicon Valley - and it shouldn't try. Vanity stats don't build companies. The real question is…

How to make something great: In the pantheon of creative endeavors-be it product design, art, architecture, software, or some hybrid creature of the…

Society

'I want him to be prepared': why parents are teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI: As AI grows increasingly prevalent, some are showing their children tools from ChatGPT to Dall-E to learn and bond

The Anti-Social Century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our…

Putting ChatGPT on the Couch: Gary Greenberg, a psychotherapist, writes about conversations with ChatGPT in which he addresses the bot as he would a…

Macro economy

A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’: An internal email reviewed by WIRED calls DOGE staff’s access to federal payments systems “the single biggest insider…

China Has Already Remade the International System: How the world adopted Beijing’s economic playbook.

Unlocking Canada’s superpower potential: Capitalising on the G7 nation’s vast geography could spark an economic boom

Francophone

Le Québec à l'heure des choix | Comment sortir le Québec de ses pantoufles ?: D'un côté, les " lucides ". De l'autre, les " solidaires ". Il y a 20 ans, deux groupes aux opinions bien campées…

Place publique avec Viviane Audet | Le sacre du matin: L'autrice-compositrice-interprète Viviane Audet prend la plume pour nous raconter un matin en famille, semblable à des…