A 10 Minute Good Reads Challenge

So, my colleague and good friend Raj prodded me towards this post. He asked us to come up with a list few memorable blog posts that we’d all liked. What constitutes a blog post was left fairly open, and could include opinion pieces from all types of media.

The List

I spent all of 10 minutes pulling this together. (And then longer finding the right links online.)

  • “Super Successful Companies”1 by Sam Altman

  • “The debilitating myth of musical chairs”2 by Seth Godin

  • “Be Good”3 by Paul Graham

  • “Python And The Principle Of Least Astonishment”4 by Armin Ronacher

  • “Narendra Modi: Man of the Masses”5 by William Dalrymple

  • “Licensing In A Post Copyright World”6 by Armin Ronacher

  • “But What If I Fail”7 by Seth Godin

  • “The Powerlessness Of Positive Thinking”8 by Adam Alter

  • “The Most Beautiful Game”9 by Geoff Dyer

  • “The End of Imagination”10 by Arundhati Roy

The Futility

This list isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t capture some of the better reads I’ve come by. It’s mostly an incongruous cocktail of authors who have been in my mind lately. Sadly, my searches through Readability and Pocket to find memorable posts within those 10 minutes proved to be futile. It’s a reminder of how in this world where a barrage of information passes us by, we quickly get consumed by the deluge. Maybe it’s time to get back to bookmarking. Or, going back and re-reading old posts that we love. And scribbling notes on the side. Oh wait, can’t do that anymore.

The Unscience

What did Raj hope to achieve out of this? Well, he’s been researching what he calls the unscience behind blog posts - a science that’s not really a science. There’s a bit of a fad today where writers who appear to have no research or scientific background craft posts with a variant of science in the title.

  • The Science of Yada Yada
  • What Science Tells Us About Yada Yada
  • The Scientific Reasons Why You Should Do Yada Yada

The posts toss together a ton of what’s often pseudo science, but are aggregrated well and presented in a credible way. And these posts are quickly lapped up masses who don’t have the patience to dig into the details themselves. Ergo, the pseudo science becomes a science that’s believed in. Intrigued or puzzled? Read Raj’s post - Unscience of Blogging.

And if you’d like to take up the 10 minute good read challenge, make your list and link back here in the comments.

References

  1. “Super Successful Companies” ↩

  2. “The debilitating myth of musical chairs” ↩

  3. Be Good ↩

  4. Python And The Principle Of Least Astonishment ↩

  5. Licensing In A Post Copyright World ↩

  6. Narendra Modi: Man of the Masses ↩

  7. But What If I Fail ↩

  8. The Powerlessness Of Positive Thinking ↩

  9. The Most Beautiful Game ↩

  10. The End of Imagination ↩

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