The Best of What I Read (and Heard) This Year - 2016

As we approach the end of 2016, one of my favorite things to do is to build a list of the best things I read. It's a way for me to personally reflect on and physically document my 2016 mindset while simultaneously providing tailored reading recommendations for those traveling this holiday season.

Before I begin, a quick product plug: In January 2016, I downloaded Pocket—an app that allows you to save articles you stumble upon online for future reading. Prior to downloading Pocket, there were countless times where I had scrolled past an article, made a mental note to read it later and then forget which article I wanted to read when I had the free time. With Pocket, I always have a list of 30-40 articles to read at all times. Oh and you can also save articles to read offline. All for free. Download it.

Without any further buildup, here are the best articles I read and podcasts I heard, organized by topic.

Technology

"Who Controls Your Facebook Feed" by Will Oremus — Behind the scenes with Facebook's news feed team. The article, published in January, is especially relevant now with echo chambers and fake news making new headlines each day.

Best Quote: "The news feed algorithm had blind spots that Facebook's data scientists couldn’t have identified on their own. It took a different kind of data—qualitative human feedback—to begin to fill them in."

"Maybe Better If You Don’t Read This Story on Public WiFi" by Maurits Martijn — After reading, I'm now wary to join any public WiFi network. Instead, I've opted for data overage charges. I've also downloaded 1Password to turn my passwords into 20ish characters of mumbo jumbo. Revamping your personal cyber security should be a top priority for everyone in 2017.

Best Quote: "Another trick that Slotboom uses is to divert my internet traffic. For example, whenever I try to access the webpage of my bank, he has instructed his program to re-direct me to a page he owns: a cloned site that appears to be identical to the trusted site, but is in fact completely controlled by Slotboom. Hackers call this DNS spoofing. The information I entered on the site is stored on the server owned by Slotboom. Within 20 minutes he’s obtained the login details, including passwords for my Live.com, SNS Bank, Facebook, and DigiD accounts."

"Is Google Making Us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr — This is an oldie (published 2008), but I finally had the chance to read it eight years later and it's even more relevant now. Carr's reservations surrounding AI are starting to become reality in 2016. Cars drive themselves. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant are more entrenched in society. "Westworld" captivated, and scared audiences with it's violent delights. If you've already read this, it's worth a reread.

Best Quote: "Still, their [Brin & Page's] easy assumption that we’d all 'be better off' if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive."

Life & Career

"Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate" by Adam Grant — Fresh off his latest best-selling book, "Originals," comes a summary article inspired from a chapter of the book. Key takeaway: Calculated, intentional and meaningful procrastination can lead to better work. Try it on your next project.

Best Quote: "Once I did finish a draft, I put it away for three weeks. When I came back to it, I had enough distance to wonder, 'What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?' and rewrote most of it. To my surprise, I had some fresh material at my disposal: During those three weeks, for example, a colleague had mentioned the fact that Mr. Sorkin was an avid procrastinator."

"9 Productivity Tips from People Who Write About Productivity" by Ron Friedman — Nine great tips for those looking to rethink how they go about their daily lives. Ironically tip no. 4 stems from Adam Grant's article above.

Best Quote: "'Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.' Instead of viewing busyness as a sign of significance, top performers interpret busyness as an indication of wasted energy."

"Incredible Things That Happen Once You Learn to Love Being Alone" by Dr. Travis Bradberry — Living in a big city, with roommates and spending most of your time at work with your colleagues does not leave much room for "me-time." Bradberry's piece serves as a needed reminder to take some time for yourself.

Best Quote: "Enjoying your own company is a huge confidence booster. If you're bored and restless when you're by yourself, it's easy to start thinking that you're boring or that you need other people around to enjoy yourself. Learning to enjoy time alone boosts your self-esteem by confirming that you are enough."

"How to Become a C.E.O.? The Quickest Path Is a Winding One" by Neil Irwin — A data-backed analysis (using LinkedIn data, a shameless plug) illuminating the fast-track journey to become a CEO.

Best Quote: "To get a job as a top executive, new evidence shows, it helps greatly to have experience in as many of a business's functional areas as possible. A person who burrows down for years in, say, the finance department stands less of a chance of reaching a top executive job than a corporate finance specialist who has also spent time in, say, marketing. Or engineering. Or both of those, plus others."

United States

"I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker" by Gabriel Thompson — A day in the life story of important workers who usually go unnoticed and unthanked.

Best Quote: "The urge to sit has become overwhelming. Two groups of men have somehow decided they ought to fight each other, but it’s too crowded even to do that. I end up next to a temp from Culinary Staffing America, who, like me, has already clocked out and so likely won't be paid for this time. Others nearby, direct employees of Levi's Stadium, are incredulous when we tell them that. They've been instructed to clock out after they reach Avaya Stadium."

"Who Are All These Trump Supporters" by George Saunders — This is the one Trump-specific article I'm picking for this "Best Of" list. Saunders does an expert job of showing, not telling who voted for Trump. A 2016 election must read article.

Best Quote: "In the broadest sense, the Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself."

"Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker" — A heartbreaking speech from the victim of the Brock Turner's sexual assault case.

Best Quote: "Your life is not over, you have decades of years ahead to rewrite your story. The world is huge, it is so much bigger than Palo Alto and Stanford, and you will make a space for yourself in it where you can be useful and happy. But right now, you do not get to shrug your shoulders and be confused anymore. You do not get to pretend that there were no red flags. You have been convicted of violating me, intentionally, forcibly, sexually, with malicious intent, and all you can admit to is consuming alcohol. Do not talk about the sad way your life was upturned because alcohol made you do bad things. Figure out how to take responsibility for your own conduct."

CNN's Reliable Sources Newsletter by Brian Stelter — Daily reporting of the media by Stelter and team. Stelter is thoughtful, honest and reflective in every newsletter and the last few months surrounding the election have been must-reads. Subscribe to the newsletter here.

Features & Profiles

"Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself" by Caity Weaver — Caity and Justin talk his monkey incident in Germany, ADHD, love life and what it's like trying to come of age in the public's eye.

Best Quote: "At age 15, Justin Bieber shot to fame because he was polished: He had shiny hair and great teeth, and he sang about wanting a girl to fall in puppy love with him. He was also rejected because he was polished: All that stuff was lame. So he became less polished. He got tattoos and a police record. But somewhere between egging a neighbor’s house and nodding off next to a Brazilian escort, he overshot it, sailing past 'badass' into regular 'bad.' Now he's recalibrated again. He's acknowledged he was bad, released a killer album to prove he's cool, and doubled down on his vows to do better. For the first time since he was a kid, Justin Bieber is regarded as neither a dork nor a monster. He has the tentative respect and unfettered attention of the general public. He's on the brink of a world tour, where a lot can go wrong (see: Germany). He's only 21."

"The Speculative Dread of 'Black Mirror'" by Giles Harvey — One on one with the man who scratched our dystopian-itch for what can happen when technology continues to innovate at it's current pace.

Best Quote: "'I think most people are inherently good,' he [Brooker] said. 'When they throw themselves behind some ugly cause, it's usually out of fear or because they're not availed of all the facts. The show generally reflects that. It's usually just people with a weakness who end up fucking up. We don't have many mustache-twirling villains. But I am a worrier and I do think things are going to go horribly wrong by accident."

How I Built This - Airbnb: Joe Gebbia — How I Built This is my favorite podcast of the year. While I encourage you to listen to every episode, I really loved this one featuring the co-founder of Airbnb.

Best Quote: "And I can tell you there is no worse feeling than getting a credit card statement that is only going up with no hope of ever paying it down. There is a name for this in the start up world. There's a name for this phase of a company where you have a product in the market but they don't fit yet. It's almost like two gears that don't touch. There's this mysterious gap between these metal gears that you can't figure out how to close the gap. And they call this the 'trough of sorrow.' It's this long period of time where you don't have product market fit. In the data or analytics, it looks like the Midwest of analytics because it's perfectly flat. There's zero growth. This is when people tend to quit."

Science

"The Fermi Paradox" by Tim Urban — I've watched "Cosmos" and "Planet Earth" three or four times each and "Planet Earth II" doesn't air in the U.S. until Jan. 28, so reading about the Fermi Paradox was the next best thing. Take 20 minutes to explore the existential question: are we alone in this universe?

Best Quote: "So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you're on the beach."

a16z Podcast - Old Food, New Tech: Clean Meat — The team at Andreesen Horowitz puts out a wonderful podcast on innovative companies, tech trends and thought leadership. They sit down with C-suite leaders at "meatless meat" and clean meat companies to discuss how the world will need to adapt to feed a growing population with limited natural resources.

Best Quote: "Our product is made for the love of meat. I'm a meat eater. My job is to appeal to people like me. If they begin to just substitute just one burger from a cow for a delicious impossible burger, you'll save 95% of the land that's consumed to make a burger from a cow, a quarter of the water, an eighth of the greenhouse gases. So our approach is a market-based approach. Give consumers a delicious option and let them want to have a burger that makes them feel like they are making a difference."

About the Author

Ross Gordon is currently a senior sales solutions consultant for LinkedIn and an alum of LinkedIn’s Business Leadership Program - Global Sales, a rotational program for early in career talent. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and has a passion for storytelling, marketing, technology and effective communication. Ross previously interned for Spotify in its revenue product marketing org and for two advertising agencies in Chicago.