4 ms·

Kevin Kelly - The Best Magazine Articles Ever

76 points by FredTale 14y ago

rohern 14y ago
This is a great list. I highly recommend "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" to everyone on this board, both those who love and those who hate capitalism.
- akamaka 14y ago
  Yep! It was a huge hit with HNers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611
acchow 14y ago
"Pearls before breakfast" was a fantastic article. Best with the accompanying video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc
- hudibras 14y ago
  Gene Weingarten is an astonishingly good writer. He has a weekly column in the Washington Post that's 'ha-ha, Dave Berry-level-funny' but then once a year or so he'll write a long piece that absolutely destroys you. Both "Peekaboo Paradox" and "Fatal Distraction" are heavy stuff. "Fatal Distraction," in particular, will be something you carry with you the rest of your life.
  - acchow 14y ago
    I would never have known that Gene Weingarten is a humor columnist. Thanks for this. Dave Barry is one of the funniest writers I've ever read :)
pchristensen 14y ago
I saw this and thought "Mother Earth, Motherboard" ... and it's the first article.
- vidarh 14y ago
  It's a fantastic article. One of very few articles online I keep referring people to, and have re-read several times. 42000+ words about a fibre optic cable without getting boring...
stephengillie 14y ago
Links to articles on their original page, instead of reading them through that site's re-renderer: http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever
- FredTale 14y ago
  Yep, that was the original link. But not all links are there working anymore and of course you can´t highlight, annotate anything.
jallmann 14y ago
My personal favorite is "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce", on SV's early days. http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html
GigiLaTrottola 14y ago
"Can you say a hero?" has such an involving prose. And luckily that "site's re-renderer" allowed me to read that text without having to read it with black text on blue background and a 186-characters-wide column
aaronharnly 14y ago
A list of notable magazine articles for techies would be remiss to omit Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" for The Atlantic Monthly[1], also known as the "memex" essay. (The article is present in the extended list[2].) The Wikipedia entry[3] does a reasonable summary and exposition. This is a poignant and prescient article, calling (in the waning days of WWII) for scientists to find meaningful peaceful objectives "worthy of their best." In the essay, Bush anticipates such inventions as: * Personal computers: "The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more." * Hypertext / the Web: "...associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing." * Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." * Speech recognition: "Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to." * Google Glass: "The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut... As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes." * Search / information retrieval: "There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene." It's a remarkable article, not just for the "gee! I recognize that!" sensation, but also because we have in many ways still failed to deliver on the promise. Despite personal wikis / DEVONthink / Evernote and friends, I don't think we've really nailed the memex. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... [2] http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
- kqr2 14y ago
  Memex was recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5378841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5378841
DrinkWater 14y ago
Before reading these articles, you HAVE to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-Century-Series/dp/0618155872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363646744&sr=8-1&keywords=best+essays+of+the+century http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-Century-Series/dp...
hfantods 14y ago
I know I'm going to enjoy a lot of these articles because David Foster Wallace has four pieces in the list. I'd recommend "Shipping Out" to the uninitiated
- hudibras 14y ago
  Probably the best essay written in the past 30 years. Supposedly, all work gradually stopped at Harper's the afternoon DFW submitted the manuscript. Every single person in the office was reading hastily-Xeroxed copies of it.
mbubb 14y ago
thanks - somehow didn't know about dotdotdot
Jun8 14y ago
This collection is gold! "Frank Sinatra has a cold" is the grandaddy of all celebrity profiles, or all modern journalism. Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age Ten" is such a good and accurate depiction of childhood. And of course DFW's pieces are great.
Byliner 14y ago
This is indeed an awesome list of amazing stories, as chosen by Kevin and his crowd-sourcing friends. KK's a friend of Byliner, and all of the pieces from this list are also on Byliner.com, although organized by writer, for convenience. Thus, if you like a specific story, you can easily do a deep dive into that writer's full body of work, which often includes dozens more great stories. (Think of it as a Github or Dribble page for that writer.) And if you read a full-text story as a subscriber, the author actually splits all subscription revenue generated by their story. It's an exciting model, and we have more than two hundred of the world's best writers on our network already, selling 1M+ stories directly to their readers. You can explore some of our writers here: https://www.byliner.com/writers/popular https://www.byliner.com/writers/popular Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nick Hornby, Chuck Palahniuk, Sebastian Junger, and more.

76 points by FredTale 14y ago

This is a great list. I highly recommend "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" to everyone on this board, both those who love and those who hate capitalism.

akamaka 14y ago
Yep! It was a huge hit with HNers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611

acchow 14y ago

"Pearls before breakfast" was a fantastic article. Best with the accompanying video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc

hudibras 14y ago
Gene Weingarten is an astonishingly good writer. He has a weekly column in the Washington Post that's 'ha-ha, Dave Berry-level-funny' but then once a year or so he'll write a long piece that absolutely destroys you. Both "Peekaboo Paradox" and "Fatal Distraction" are heavy stuff. "Fatal Distraction," in particular, will be something you carry with you the rest of your life.
- acchow 14y ago
  I would never have known that Gene Weingarten is a humor columnist. Thanks for this. Dave Barry is one of the funniest writers I've ever read :)

pchristensen 14y ago

I saw this and thought "Mother Earth, Motherboard" ... and it's the first article.

vidarh 14y ago
It's a fantastic article. One of very few articles online I keep referring people to, and have re-read several times. 42000+ words about a fibre optic cable without getting boring...

stephengillie 14y ago

Links to articles on their original page, instead of reading them through that site's re-renderer: http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever

FredTale 14y ago
Yep, that was the original link. But not all links are there working anymore and of course you can´t highlight, annotate anything.

jallmann 14y ago

My personal favorite is "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce", on SV's early days. http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html

GigiLaTrottola 14y ago

"Can you say a hero?" has such an involving prose. And luckily that "site's re-renderer" allowed me to read that text without having to read it with black text on blue background and a 186-characters-wide column

aaronharnly 14y ago

A list of notable magazine articles for techies would be remiss to omit Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" for The Atlantic Monthly[1], also known as the "memex" essay. (The article is present in the extended list[2].) The Wikipedia entry[3] does a reasonable summary and exposition. This is a poignant and prescient article, calling (in the waning days of WWII) for scientists to find meaningful peaceful objectives "worthy of their best." In the essay, Bush anticipates such inventions as: * Personal computers: "The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more." * Hypertext / the Web: "...associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing." * Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." * Speech recognition: "Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to." * Google Glass: "The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut... As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes." * Search / information retrieval: "There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene." It's a remarkable article, not just for the "gee! I recognize that!" sensation, but also because we have in many ways still failed to deliver on the promise. Despite personal wikis / DEVONthink / Evernote and friends, I don't think we've really nailed the memex. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... [2] http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

kqr2 14y ago
Memex was recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5378841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5378841

DrinkWater 14y ago

Before reading these articles, you HAVE to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-Century-Series/dp/0618155872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363646744&sr=8-1&keywords=best+essays+of+the+century http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-Century-Series/dp...

hfantods 14y ago

I know I'm going to enjoy a lot of these articles because David Foster Wallace has four pieces in the list. I'd recommend "Shipping Out" to the uninitiated

hudibras 14y ago
Probably the best essay written in the past 30 years. Supposedly, all work gradually stopped at Harper's the afternoon DFW submitted the manuscript. Every single person in the office was reading hastily-Xeroxed copies of it.

mbubb 14y ago

thanks - somehow didn't know about dotdotdot

Jun8 14y ago

This collection is gold! "Frank Sinatra has a cold" is the grandaddy of all celebrity profiles, or all modern journalism. Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age Ten" is such a good and accurate depiction of childhood. And of course DFW's pieces are great.

Byliner 14y ago

This is indeed an awesome list of amazing stories, as chosen by Kevin and his crowd-sourcing friends. KK's a friend of Byliner, and all of the pieces from this list are also on Byliner.com, although organized by writer, for convenience. Thus, if you like a specific story, you can easily do a deep dive into that writer's full body of work, which often includes dozens more great stories. (Think of it as a Github or Dribble page for that writer.) And if you read a full-text story as a subscriber, the author actually splits all subscription revenue generated by their story. It's an exciting model, and we have more than two hundred of the world's best writers on our network already, selling 1M+ stories directly to their readers. You can explore some of our writers here: https://www.byliner.com/writers/popular https://www.byliner.com/writers/popular Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nick Hornby, Chuck Palahniuk, Sebastian Junger, and more.