My books of 2014
As Chartbeat has grown to 95 people, I’ve found it harder and harder to devote significant time to reading. I found more escape than usual in fiction and some months felt very meagre indeed. Still, the...
View ArticleOn Writing Well by William Zinsser: selected notes
These are some of the highlights for me from Zinsser’s book. RIP. – But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long...
View ArticleA correction around the death of the mobile web
David Pakman of Venrock recently wrote a good piece on where we spend our attention. He’s absolutely right that attention is the true currency of the media business and drops a lot of knowledge....
View ArticleWhat we break when we fix for Ad Blocking
I’ve been doing an informal poll of journalists, media executives, ad tech people and VPs of sales over the last few weeks. Each of these people owe their livelihood to digital advertising and yet the...
View ArticleMy books of 2015
In 2015, I got the chance to read 54 new books, though they seemed to fall into narrower fields than in previous years. I’ve divided them into categories and the starred books at the top of each are my...
View ArticleLooking Back: Seven Years at Chartbeat
I broke the news over on the Chartbeat blog today that recently I resigned as CEO from the company that has dominated my every waking thought for the last seven years. I feel like it’s time to get my...
View ArticleMy Books of 2016
I fell one short of my book a week goal at 51 books in 2016. This year I’ve excerpted some books where I thought a particular passage was self contained and gave a sense of the whole. However, books...
View ArticleMy Books of 2017
I managed to get through 38 books this year. Book of the Year was Bertrand Russell’s mammoth History of Western Philosophy, written by one of the few people who could write about Aristotle as a peer....
View ArticleMy Books of 2018
2018 was a year that unconsciously revolved around power and entropy. The 48 books were dominated by Robert Caro’s incredible LBJ series, a late fascination with the physics and neuroscience of time...
View ArticleMy Books of 2021
Fiction I fell in love with the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie this year. Half of a Yellow Sun was probably the best fiction book I read all year. GreatHalf of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi...
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