Kevin Kelly - The Best Magazine Articles Ever | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Kelly - The Best Magazine Articles Ever

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76 pointsFredTale20 comments

My personal favorite is "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce", on SV's early days.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html

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

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.

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 :)

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-ma...

[2] http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

Memex was recently discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5378841

In the same vein is J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor's "The Computer as a Communication Device" from 1968 [1]:

"future version of this system will make it possible for each participant, on his own TV screen, to thumb through the speaker’s files as the speaker talks—and thus check out incidental questions without interrupting the presentation for substantiation."

"You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours and the parts to which they should be linked-and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together"

"When people do their informational work 'at the console' and 'through the network,' telecommunication will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now. The impact of that fact, and of the marked facilitation of the communicative process, will be very great—both on the individual and on society"

[1] http://memex.org/licklider.pdf

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

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...

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

Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nick Hornby, Chuck Palahniuk, Sebastian Junger, and more.

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

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

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

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.

Before reading these articles, you HAVE to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-Century-Series/dp...

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.

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.

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

"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

thanks - somehow didn't know about dotdotdot

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