The best of everything I read in 2022:

10 Mental Models For Learning Anything by Scott H. Young

This is great, and especially number three which made me realize at thing I've been at the edge at. For a while I've realized that working quickly as a junior software engineer is a bit of a cheat code. Not for obvious reasons, but because it's a feedback loop. The early career engineer who makes six changes a week instead of three is touching twice as many things, most of which contain new concepts. Opportunities to learn. 

Mental model three here makes it even more of a cheat code: If knowledge grows exponentially, then you're more than doubling you're learning by working faster. 

Also, I like this post because if you're going to write about mental models you should absolutely use images to illustrate the models.

The Pugilist At Rest by Thom Jones

I mean the whole collections of short stories, but also especially this short story. I hadn't realized Jones died, more than five years ago now. His stories are as electric now as I remember them being when I first read them in my early twenties.

This first story in the collection always gets me at the switch, after in concludes the narrative and begins the extended epilogue by explaining who Theogenes was. The first time I read that, I immediately wanted to write a story like that. And I still do.

Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever

I needed this. The explanation of everything that happened from the inside-est insider. Also, I never need to read this again. Truly a one and done. And, if like me, you've ever woken up in the middle of the night wondering What The Hell Happened To Tony Anyway? You probably need to read this.

John Collison on how everything made was someone's passion project

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

— John Collison (@collision) May 25, 2022

Greater Los Angeles

The first thing I read this year that made me sit up and go, yes, that's a truth I hadn't considered before.

A Domestic Poem For Portia by Jim Harrison

...But there's an odd grace in being
an ordinary artist. A single tradition clipping the heads
off so many centuries. Those two drunks a millennium ago on
a mountaintop in China - laughing over the beauty of the moment.
At peace despite their muddled brains...

How to Cook for Odysseus by Simon Sarris

Just about the last thing I read this year. I'm not going to change my diet or anything; while I already eat reasonably close to this and don't skip on the meat, I hold closer to the Michael Pollan philosophy of Eat food, mostly plants, not too much as being the best fit for me at my age. I like the ethos of this post and the authority Sarris writes with. Also, his Twitter might be the best commercial for settling down into a trad life.

Mailbag: What isn't measurable? To hire as exec or not? by Will Larson

Any post about what to look for in a role serves the double duty of also being preparation material for becoming a killer candidate in that role.