FeedlyGoodbye information overload.

VS CodeCode editing. Redefined.

OvercastPodcast player with smart speed.

PinboardSocial book­marking for introverts.

Sherlock“A strange, fascinating, and sometimes brilliant contemporary take on the father of forensic crime-solving.”
- Matthew Gilbert The Boston Globe

True Detective“It's about whether our lives really matter at all. That's scarier than the scariest monster.”
- Tim Molloy The Wrap

Sharp Objects“A tantalising, confident show with a strong female voice, even if that voice sometimes belongs to monsters.”
- Wenlei Ma news.com.au

Atlanta“Masterfully blends humor, irony and art to capture the desire for something better as well as the sense of defeat and complacency that racism and classism create.”
- Mekeisha Madden Toby Essence

Patrick Melrose“Everything is opulent, and everything is desperate: just right, in other words... This is basically Trainspotting, with better shoes and more sophisticated small talk.”
- Rachel Cooke New Statesman

The Affair“People do terrible things to each other on TV every Sunday night. I'm more than ready for a show willing to admit that the worst possible behavior is quite often perfectly legal.”
- Andy Greenwald Grantland

Fauda“In offering rich and nuanced portrayals of characters on both sides of a violent conflict, it recalls some of the things that made The Wire such compelling television.”
- Jonathan Beecher Field Decider

BoJack Horseman“By now, we shouldn't be surprised that BoJack can do anything, or be anything. It can be the funniest show on TV and the saddest within the span of seconds.”
- Alan Sepinwall RollingStone

Patriot“A mood-driven blend of drama and comedy, one whose editing, direction, lighting and pithy dialogue collaborate to steep the viewer in absurdist weirdness.”
- Melanie McFarland Salon

Mindhunter“Under the direction of Fincher, there is an unshowy, meticulous cinematic quality that draws you in, irresistibly, to its pale-brown world of desk jobs and smoky cinemas.”
- Ben Lawrence The Telegraph

Breaking Bad“Breaking Bad works as an unabashedly bold story about a man in extremis, told with the iconographic and ironic sensibility of Quentin Tarantino.”
- Matthew Gilbert The Boston Globe

Narcos“Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason magical realism was born in Colombia.”
- Tirdad Derakshani The Philadelphia Inquirer

Graham Farmelo The Strangest Man“Here's a puzzle. Bristol boy – slightly older contemporary of Bristol's other boy Cary Grant – has an unhappy childhood, but doesn't mention it for 50 years; learns to speak French, German and Russian, but becomes famous for his long silences; embarks on the wrong career; gets interested in mathematics and ends up at Cambridge, where he becomes famous for his even longer silences; hears about Einstein and gets into advanced physics; and then goes to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, who grumbles to Ernest Rutherford, ‘This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything.’ ”
- Tim Radford The Guardian

James Gleick Genius“One of the most celebrated minds of the past century, Feynman was a champion of scientific knowledge so effective and so beloved that he has generated an entire canon of personal mythology. And yet he held uncertainty at the center of his intellectual and creative life. The pursuit and stewardship of knowledge was his life’s work, but the ecstasy of not-knowing was the wellspring of his magic. ‘It is imperative,’ he wrote, ‘to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature.’ ”
- Maria Popova Brainpickings

Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas The Wise Men“Except for the authors' somewhat romantic impression of the Establishment, it is from the point of view of one who lived most of the reported events a sober and straightforward account of what actually happened and why. It is a tonic, long overdue.”
- Michael V. Forrestal Foreign Affairs

Ian Buruma A Tokyo Romance“Everywhere, ‘the seedy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody, the smelly, all that permeated the arts scene.’ This was a far cry from the polished world of the tea ceremony and flower arrangement, but it was part of a worldwide trend which, Buruma explained in an email interview with The Japan Times, expressed itself in Japan as a ‘rebellion against a rather stultified high culture — kabuki, noh and so on — and an equally stuffy modern tradition of imitating European high culture.’ ”
- Martin Laflamme The Japan Times

Jeremy Adelman Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman“People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are ‘apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.’”
- Malcolm Gladwell The New Yorker

Entangled LifeMerlin Sheldrake “is an ode to other ways of being.”
- Rob Dunn Science

Peter Godfrey Smith Other Minds“If we met an alien whose intelligence derived through an entirely separate provenance from ours, would we recognize the sparkle in each other’s eyes?
- Carl Safina The New York Times

Robert Sapolsky Behave“What makes our species unique is only the tip of the iceberg, while underneath sits a vast reservoir of continuity with other organisms.”
- Frans de Waal Science

Timothy Garton Ash Free Speech“directing us how to live civilly in our connected diversity.”
- John Loyd Financial Times

Marcus Aurelis Meditations“It's a ‘wretched, whining monkey life’. But once you accept this, says Marcus, you'll cheer up.”
- Blake Morrison The Guardian

Dag Hammarskjöld Vägmärken / Markings“I have no hesitancy in calling this work the noblest self‐disclosure of spiritual struggle and triumph, perhaps the greatest testament of personal devotion, published in this century.”
- Henry P Van Dusen The New York Times

Jean Tirole Economics for the Common Good“ ‘Researchers have an obligation to society to take positions on questions on which they have acquired professional competence,’ Tirole writes, yet he does not see the media as ‘a natural habitat’ for an academic. ‘The distinctive characteristic of academics, their DNA, is doubt.’ ”
- Martin Sandbu Financial Times

Joel Mokyr A Culture of Growth“Sees economic growth as the result of ideas rather than material conditions or political and economic institutions. [The author] has long explored the role of technology — how innovations come about, and how they are adopted and translated into everyday improvements in living standards.”
- Diane Coyle Financial Times

Nicholas Wapshott Keynes - Hayek“Keynes came from the heart of a Cambridge tradition (later continued in that other Cambridge in Massachusetts) that saw economics as a humane discipline or moral science, providing tools for earnest attempts to do good in the world. Hayek, by contrast, with his background in the Austrian school, was absorbed in a quest to understand the abstract beauties of the price mechanism, with some impatience for restless advocates of quick-fix solutions.”
- Peter Clarke The Guardian

Martin Sandbu Europe's Orphan“Sandbu is to be commended for allowing readers to dig beyond the accepted orthodox explanations for the Eurozone crisis and offer a more considered, evidence based approach that cuts through the dogma of ideology that seems to have informed so much of the commentary on this subject in the 1990s and in the brave new world we currently find ourselves”
- Ahmed Razzaq Birkbeck Law Review

Paul Tucker Unelected Power“It is often said that the chair of the Federal Reserve is the second most important person in Washington.”
- Lawrence H. Summers The Washington Post

Alvin E Roth Who Gets What - and Why“Roth designs ‘matching markets,’ where price alone can't balance supply and demand – think of markets for everything from marriage to college admissions. Indeed, he's even saved lives by helping to design an ingenious way to match more donated kidneys to needy patients.”
- Peter Passell Milken Intitute

Andrew W Lo Adaptive Markets“What keeps consumer behavior from being utterly chaotic is the process of selection. The process of selection, by weeding out bad behaviors from good ones, ensures that consumer behavior, while not necessarily optimal or ‘rational’, is usually good enough”.
- Andrew W Lo Milken Institute

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money“money does not emerge from private exchanges, as claimed by orthodox theories of money, but from political power. The value of money depends on the confidence the state can create with regard to its ability to extract parts of the national product through taxation in order to repay its debt by serving its bonds.”
- Jens Beckert American Journal of Sociology

Albert O Hirschman The Passions and the Interests“By what alchemy did avarice - among the deadliest of the seven deadly sins - come to be transmuted into the legitimate pursuit of wealth in modern capitalist society?”
- Nannerl O Keohane The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Mariana Mazzucato The Value of Everything“is timely in that it helps us distinguish between value creation and value extraction and gives a new lens through which to look at economic phenomena.”
- Rose Deller LSE Review of Books

Albert Vigoileis Thelen The Island of Second Sight“one of the true great incarnations of the storyteller [...] so garrulous, clever, and original that you will willingly follow him down any cow-path he cares to tread. Which is every path that offers itself. At 736 pages, discursion is the novel’s mode, and it is hard to say what is plot and what is tangent.”
- Amanda DeMarco Three Percent

Ian McGuire North Water“there is, behind the narrative, a theory being worked out of how historical fiction can be credibly managed now. Although there are no anachronisms in the book, there are also no long, wearying pages describing the clothing of the period, or the system of belief, or set pieces about the political or social background.”
- Colm Toibin The New York Times

Alfred Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz“while the book is funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled, its lasting resonance lies not in its hulking antihero or picaresque narrative beats but rather in its collage-like depiction of the city.”
- Dustin Illingworth The Paris Review

Matt Goulding Grape, Olive Pig“Anthony Bourdain [ … ] knows Goulding is a long-time resident of Barcelona and, as I do, envies Goulding’s qualifications for writing Grape, Olive, Pig, ‘You go out to dinner at midnight, start drinking again at noon, nap around three, nibble on olives and little bites of awesomeness when you rise, and pretty much live the dream. So, yeah, fuck you, Matt.’ ”
- Samantha Reid Aviña Los Angeles Review of Books

Marti Buckley Basque Country“Simplicity and beauty dominate the dishes in this book. The colors are deep, the flavors deeper. The small Basque area of Spain and France has more Michelin stars than any other region in the world. The classic dishes of the home are on display in the book and you will develop a sense of the culinary foundations underpinning food centers like San Sebastián.”
- Brian Cooking by the book

Yotam Ottolenghi Plenty“One of those cookbooks you dribble over while flicking through its pages. The recipes – roasted butternut squash with sweet spices, lime and green chilli, for example, or caramelised fennel with goat's curd; stuffed cabbage or saffron cauliflower; artichoke gratin or smoky frittata – are gloriously original without being overwrought. They demand to be eaten. It takes a while to notice that they are also completely meat-free. This is food which sounds very nice indeed.”
- Jay Rayner The Guardian

Peter Watson Ideas“at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the average Briton was closer in amenities to Julius Caesar than to his or her own grandchildren. The grandparents of today's generation didn't have so many gadgets as their children do now but they did have earlier versions of cars, TV, phones, airplanes, they were familiar with the works of Freud and Einstein, and already knew what DNA was. Contrary to what we smugly assume, the world is not changing as fast as it was in even the recent past. We need some new ideas badly.”
- Peter Watson The Guardian

Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence“Barzun moved to the US in 1920 and, based at Columbia University, became one of its starriest and most combative academics [ … ] He has been an emeritus professor since 1967, suggesting the need for some enhanced term of venerability. This book concludes his lifelong quest to relate historical events to cultural expression, and to understand the process of change. His question is nothing less than that which Tolstoy poses at the end of War and Peace : "What is the force that moves nations?”
- Stephen Moss The Guardian

Carlos Eire Reformations. The Early Modern World, 1450-1650“an introduction and survey of the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe that ushered in the modern world and a wonderful read for the nonspecialist. Transparent and elegant, Reformations explains our modern present by looking back to our medieval past.”
- Lee Trepaier Voegelin View

Peter Watson The German Genius“Places scientific discoveries at the core of cultural history, linking them with dramatic technical and industrial developments. Watson sums up this process in the words of the historian Max Lenz: "The intellectual life cannot be too highly valued. It provides the basis on which the strength of the state can eternally rest.”
- Edward Timms Independent

William Cronon Nature's Metropolis“In his classic, ground-breaking work Nature’s Metropolis, published in 1991 and still the best book ever written about Chicago, William Cronon notes: During the nineteenth century, when Chicago was at the height of its gargantuan growth, its citizens rather prided themselves on the wonder and horror their hometown evoked in visitors. No other city in America had ever grown so large so quickly; none had so rapidly overwhelmed the countryside around it to create so urban a world.

Those who sought to explain its unmatched expansion often saw it as being compelled by deep forces within nature itself, gathering the resources and energies of the Great West — the region stretching from the Appalachians and Great Lakes to the Rockies and the Pacific — and concentrating them in a single favored spot at the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan…a city destined for greatness by nature’s own prophesies: Nature’s Metropolis.”
- Patrick T Reardon

Michael Pye The Edge of the World“The accomplishments of those who lived on the shores of the North Sea in the middle ages did indeed place them, not on the edge of the world, but in the very mainstream of European civilisation. Some of these are well-known: be it Bede, devising the calendar that we still use today, or the merchants of Antwerp and Amsterdam, preparing the way for modern capitalism in their bourses and counting houses. Others, though, are less obvious; and it is the measure of Pye’s achievement that he can breathe life into the traders of seventh-century Frisia or the beguines of late-medieval Flanders as well as into his more celebrated subjects. The Lowlands, in particular, emerge from his study as having as much claim to be the womb of modernity as anywhere in medieval Europe. From fashion to feminism, from money to marriage customs, Pye makes a convincing case that they pioneered them all.”
- Tom Holland The Guardian

David Abulafia The Great Sea“In an age when satellite technology and the internet have made of the ‘Great Sea’ but a small element in the global mosaic, one, nevertheless, where the periodic loss of lives in yet other desperate diasporas across continents sadly still occurs, David Abulafia’s history of the Mediterranean distinguishes itself by adopting a unit of analysis which concentrates on the Mediterranean Sea and the islands across it, its shores and their connectivities. The role of the Mediterranean crossroads in bringing together the people from across it, and far beyond, is highlighted through a narrative style which ensures the place of the story in the history. The narrative which emerges in the pages of The Great Sea, linking the sequence of Mediterraneans, is a connected narrative, held together by the underlying message that the history of the Sea is more than the sum of its parts, and larger than the mosaic of national histories which had traditionally supplied the raw material of the majority of Mediterranean history books. In this sense, David Abulafia’s account of Mediterranean history reads like a biography of the Sea and its people.”
- Charles Dalli Nexus Institut

Martin Meredith The Fate of Africa“In the words of an African proverb cited in Martin Meredith's Sisyphean new volume: "You never finish eating the meat of an elephant." That thought is summoned by the overwhelmingly difficult assignment that this historian, biographer and journalist has given himself. He has set out to present a panoramic view of African history during the past half century, and to contain all its furious upheaval in a single authoritative volume.

Everything about this subject is immense: the idealism, megalomania, economic obstacles, rampant corruption, unimaginable suffering (AIDS, famine, drought and genocide are only its better-known causes) and hopelessly irreconcilable differences leading to endless warfare. "The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain but not eliminate the rebels," read a typically bleak 1969 American assessment of a standoff in Guinea-Bissau.”
- Janet Maslin The New York Times

Neal Ascherson The Black Sea“The Black Sea will always attract people with an interest in modern nationalism, classical history and poetry. Neal Ascherson is the most eloquent member of that camp in Britain. And in this book, his fifth, he has chosen a genre to suit his subject. His Black Sea is neither a travelogue nor a history, and is certainly not a political tract. It is rather a mix of history and reportage, a collection of odd stories about a singular place, a description of an unusual region; perhaps it is best described as a longer-than-usual version of one of his famous Sunday columns. Most of all, though, Black Sea is a meditation upon a particular theme: the clash between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’.”
- Anne Applebaum Literary Review

Tony Judt Postwar“He dares to expound the sum total of Europe since 1945 in a seamless narrative. By presenting "an avowedly personal interpretation", he accepts that his personal make-up will be reflected in the end product. His French expertise, his Jewish background, his American mission and, one suspects, a mis-spent political youth can all help to explain particular, and not always felicitous, points of emphasis. So what? This is history-writing with a human face, as well as with brainpower.”
- Norman Davies The Guardian

Roger Crowley City of Fortune“Fortune can mean material wealth or luck, and the author describes Venice in terms of both. One traditional symbol for fortune is the wheel whose turning indicates the rising and falling of fortunes. The book opens as Venice’s fortunes rise high, and closes as they wane. Fortune has also been personified as mistress of the seas, with the billowing sails of her ship indicating that the winds of fortune are inconstant — a most suitable image for the story of the five centuries covered in this book.”
- Alice Padwe Washington Independent

Nicholas Ostler Empires of the Word“Aims to open a new avenue of historical analysis, where "language dynamics" becomes a tool for the study of societies. Language-communities, he argues, are bigger players on the world stage than princes and statesmen. He quotes Bismarck, asked in 1898 to name a defining event in recent history, and replying "North America speaks English". The alliances which shaped 20th-century history were one long vindication of those words.”
- Michael Church Independent

Jonathan Israel Radical Enlightenment“The size of Israel’s labours is eye-catching. Each work in the trilogy runs to almost a thousand pages; in total there must be close to two million words here. Equally eye-catching is the detail. Israel possesses an astonishing command of sources in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Swedish. It sometimes seems as if there is no pamphlet he has not read, no debate he has not revisited, no intellectual alleyway into which he has not poked his head. What really sets the trilogy apart, however, is the way that Israel has wielded all that detail to cement a new structure for understanding the Enlightenment.”
- Kenan Malik New Humanist

Jill Lepore These Truths“Offers the basic civics education that every American needs, […] a welcome corrective to the corrosive histories peddled by partisans.
[…]
Armed with the facts of what happened before, we are better able to approach our collective task of figuring out what should happen now.”
- Casey N. Cep Harvard Magazine

Bradley Efron & Trevor Hastie Computer Age Statistical Inference“If you are only ever going to buy one statistics book, or if you are thinking of updating your library and retiring a dozen or so dusty stats texts, this book would be an excellent choice. In 475 carefully crafted pages, Efron and Hastie examine the last 100 years or so of statistical thinking from multiple viewpoints.”
- Joseph Rickert R Views

Vladimir Cherkassky & Filip Mulier Learning from Data“The authors have succeeded in summarizing some of the recent trends and future challenges in different learning methods, including enabling technologies and some interesting practical applications. […] The best feature of this book is its simple presentation style, which does not use much mathematics. The contents and the references presented could serve as first aid information for many advanced data mining topics, however.”
- Ajith Abraham Computing Reviews

Pankaj Mishra
Age of Anger“The appeal of demagogues [ … ] lies in their ability to take generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing something”
- Kate Bailsey LSE Review of Books

Gary Gerstle
Liberty and Coercion“offers an ambitious re­interpretation of American political history from the founding to the present.”
- Beverly Gage The New York Times

Timothy Snyder The Road to Unfreedom“Even presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin came up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin. […] an early critic of Bolshevism, [he] had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. […] To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a ‘simulacrum’ of democracy in which the Russian people would speak ‘naturally’ with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as ‘redeemer’ for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be ‘rituals’ designed to endorse that power, periodically ‘uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation’.”
- Tim Adams The Guardian