Essay Reading List

These are some essays I find myself regularly re-reading. I’ll continue updating this list as I remember old essays or stumble onto new ones.

• Corn-pone Opinions – Mark Twain
• The Relativity of Wrong – Isaac Asimov
• The Rise of Worse is Better – Richard Gabriel
• Worse is worse – Jim Waldo
• Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change – Neil Postman
• Five Ways To Build 100 Million Business – Christoph Janz
• The Tyranny of Small Decisions – Alfred Kahn
• Politics and the English Language – George Orwell
• How to say nothing in five hundred words – Paul McHenry Roberts
• The Age of the Essay – Paul Graham
• The Median Isn’t the Message – Stephen Jay Gould
• Cargo Cult Science – Richard Feynman
• Basics of the Unix Philosophy – Eric Raymond
• Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool – George Orwell
• You and Your Research – Richard Hamming
• The Dignified Professor – Richard Feynman
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness – Jo Freeman
• The Use of Knowledge in Society – F.A. Hayek
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner
• Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming – Neil Gaiman