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