My Favorite Things of 2023

Here's a list of the things I enjoyed most in 2023. They didn't all release last year, but I discovered them all in 2023. We’ll return to our irregularly scheduled long-form recs next time. Enjoy!

Listen 🎧🎼

Podcasts

• Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton: John Mayer, Rosalía, Ian Rogers, Daniel Kaluuya

• Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent | Conversations with Tyler (Cowen)

• Kevin Kelly -- Be Generous and Unique | Invest Like the Best

• Jeremy Giffon -- Special Situations in Private Markets | Invest Like the Best

• LVMH: The Complete History and Strategy | Acquired

• Nintendo's Origins: The Complete History and Strategy | Acquired

• Nintendo: The Console Wars: The Complete History and Strategy | Acquired

• Josh Miller - Founder of Browser Co - Internet Misfits

• Working with Steve Jobs (Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda) | Founders

• My own horn, but if you missed it, I was a guest on Spencer Kier's Audience of One

Albums

• Desire, I Want to Turn Into You — Caroline Polachek

• Beatopia-- Beabadoobee

• No Thank You -- Lil Simz

• Spirit of Eden -- Talk Talk

• Modal Soul -- Nujabees

• Pink Moon - a Journey on Piano

• lol @ none of these being from 2023. oops.

Watch 🎥 📺

Films

• Past Lives

• Oppenheimer

• The Banshees of Inisherin

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire

• The Wind Rises

Series

• The Bear -- S2 Ep 7, in particular. Perhaps my favorite TV episode ever.

  • The Bear's Best Ingredient Is Tenderness

Videos & Clips

• Story Machines Vol. 1: Introduction to Mechanical Storytelling h/t Blake Robbins

• Best Interview Question Ever - Steven Spielberg "Thank you for that."

• Rick Rubin: The Invisibility of Hip Hop's Greatest Producer

• David Byrne practicing his moves for Stop Making Sense

• Ian McKellen reads Kurt Vonnegut's inspirational letter to some students

• The Cultural Tutor: From McDonald's to Twitter Stardom | How I Write Podcast

• Caroline Polachek: Tiny Desk Concert

• John Mayer & Zane Lowe

• Jake Rush's Standup Special for 800 Pound Gorilla

• Interview with Benjamin Labatut for Louisiana Channel

• James Turrell's Roden Crater

Read 📖📄

Books

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

  • “‘No.’ Sam didn’t believe it was possible to spoil a game. The point was not what happened, but the process of getting to what happened.”

• Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs in his own words; See also Founders Podcast version

  • "So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent."

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

• Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)

  • https://x.com/jacksondahl/status/1734309773535752457?s=20

• Hon. Mention: The Overstory by Richard Powers (I'm ~50% through)

Articles, Essays, Etc.

• How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham; some highlights

• Are You Serious? by Visakan Veerasamy

• Looking for Alice by Henrik Karlsson

  • “The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.”

• Malleable Software in the Age of LLMs by Geoffrey Litt

• The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis h/t Joshua Kushner

• How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World

• How to Blow Up a Timeline by Eugene Wei

• What's a God to a Machine? by Jeff Weiss for The Ringer

• The Casino on Mars by Matt Huang

• The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking by Finlo Rohrer for BBC News Magazine

• Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Life's Work

• Quit Your Job by Wolf Tivy for Palladium Mag

• Everything is Fertile by Nick Cammarata

• Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni

• David Erlich's Review of The Boy and The Heron for Indiewire

• Draft No. 4 by John McPhee for The New Yorker

• First Word Art / Last Word Art by Michael Naimark

• Another Day in Paradise by Andrew Kortina

• Will A.I. Become the Next McKinsey? by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker

• Lifehacks by Alexey Guzey

• The Long Goodbye by Jeff Weiss

  • “Life is short and art is long."

Quotes

“What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?” - Karl Ove Knausgård

"A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters." -- David Whyte (via Patrick O’Shaughnessy

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." — Simone Weil (via Eugene Wei)

“Don’t compromise yourself. you are all you’ve got. there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, it’s all the same day.” — Janis Joplin (via David T. Phung)

David Bowie on how to produce your best work: “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting."

"You lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they themselves expect. Provide them a reputation that they can step up to." — Kevin Kelly

"If you leave something behind, you gain something too." — Past Lives

Other

• Klein Blue at MoMA, NYC

• TV Charts

• Woodblock paintings by Hasui Kawase

Tweets

• i love the r/flashlight community so much

• Everything can be charismatic, not just people. Ideas, writing, spaces, structures, things. It's worth the extra effort.

• The future of making art favors taste over skill, and will continue to do so indefinitely until it is effectively 100% taste.

• taylor swift baby boom

• Taylor Swift is like an autistic person whose hyperfixation is normal stuff

• the death of the 2nd place

• OpenAI & France

• men used to build stuff like this and now they're on letterboxd

• letterboxd cheating scandal

• heroes and villains

• new york can’t be a real place

• this oppenheimer movie is way too long

• One of my favorite definitions of “music” is via artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who said: “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”

• babylon sleepers

• new york personalities

• the most terrifying thing is that "things are gonna change" and the most hopeful thing in the world is that "things are gonna change"

• Joel Embiid, MVP

• a new york moment

• heteronyms

• morning routine

• an all-time great acting performance and paul dano in little miss sunshine

• rothko's calendar

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Finally, Andrew and I recorded another podcast just before the holidays. This is a much more casual format of us just catching up with the microphones on. We have lots of wind-ranging conversations anyway, so we figured some of you might enjoy tuning in. Includes, but not limited to: white elephant gifts, The Mind, padel and pickleball, the current and exceptional slate of movies, Jeff Bezos, and mental health. You can watch or listen below.

Thank you all for reading. I hope these and past recommendations fill you up in whatever way you need. Happy New Year. May 2024 bring you closer to yourself and toward becoming. I hope you are kind to others, reach deeper, and ask the big and hard questions. Life is much richer for it. Don’t forget to settle into presence: life’s just a bunch of todays.