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Jenny Odell
Jenny Odell is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019) was the best book I read in 2023.
You should also check some of her art projects, like the Bureau of Suspended Objects where she documented the context of objects found in garbage and Neo Surreal, where she selected images from 80's Byte Magazine advertisements and recontextualized them.
Maggie Appleton
Maggie Appleton is a designer and anthropologist. Her article about Digital Gardens, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden got me started thinking about the nature of the modern Web and was a big influence in the design of this site.
Maria Popova
Maria Popova's The Marginalian site has been a recurring source of inspiration and interesting references. Her essays often lead me to new books and authors.
In Becoming the Marginalian she reflects about the site and her writing at the ocasion of the site renaming from Brain Pickings to The Marginalian.
Other posts you can take a look:
- Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
- Wintering: Resilience, the Wisdom of Sadness, and How the Science of Trees Illuminates the Art of Self-Renewal Through Difficult Times
- How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
James Somers
James Somers is a writer and programmer. He writes about thecnology in publications like the New Yorker and the Atlantic and his blog is filled with interesting short posts about a variety of interesting topics.
His article A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft in the 2023 issue of the New Yorker dedicate to AI is a good introduction.
And I ended up buying the book Field Notes on Science & Nature because of one of his posts, More people should write.