book review
‘Exadelic’ takes a shot at being Silicon Valley’s ‘Ready Player One’
We don’t often review books at TechCrunch, let alone fiction, but sometimes a work comes along that is just so carefully tuned to the ecosystem we cover that it justifies…
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TechCrunch interview: ‘Palo Alto’ author Malcolm Harris
“I feel like if we know Elon Musk’s name in a hundred years, that’s a very, very bad sign.”
Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn is taking public his secret battle with bipolar disorder
Andy Dunn, the co-founder and former CEO of the men’s clothing company Bonobos, has something new to sell: his life story. It might just save another life. In “Burn Rate,”…
Gift Guide: Extremely Online books
If you can’t read a good book without stopping every few pages to tweet about it, you might be what we call Extremely Online. You unabashedly distinguish between real life…
Gift Guide: The best business books for 2021 recommended by VCs
Welcome to part two of our venture capital-recommended book gift guide for 2021 – talking about books that do have a business theme.
Gift Guide: The best non-business books for 2021 recommended by VCs
We’re pretty big reading nerds here at TechCrunch, which means that we like to collect yearly book recommendations and share them with you.
‘Several People Are Typing’ is the Slack workspace of your worst nightmares
Now that it’s October, it’s officially spooky season. But debut author Calvin Kasulke’s novel “Several People Are Typing” gives us something new to be afraid of — what if you…
We’re not in competition with China; we’re at war, argues a provocative new book
If China once seemed to be committed to the free market economy, over the course of 2021, it has shattered that illusion entirely by abruptly disempowering its own tech companies…
It’s a big moment for climate change. Here are 4 books for autumn to understand what’s changing
We’re just weeks away from COP26, the big environmental policy confab where scores of world leaders will descend on Scotland and determine the future of the planet, answering the question,…
Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. The pace of change over the last few decades is only set to accelerate in the coming years, as improvements in…
“The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at…
Roughly two hours pass between my initial email and our first Zoom chat — on a Sunday, no less. I skip the post-gym shower and pop on a baseball cap,…
Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It’s systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn…
Should Mark Zuckerberg be scared of Peter Thiel?
Unless you’ve been in a cave over the last week, you’ve likely read a review or some discussion about “The Contrarian,” a new book about billionaire investor Peter Thiel by…
Should we care about the lives of our kids’ kids’ kids’ kids’?
We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel…
Reid Hoffman’s latest book gives us 10 ways to rethink entrepreneurship
When you’re in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner? That friendly shoulder is the…
Space may be the endless frontier, but here on Earth, we define space in the modern sense as something enclosed. Walls, fences and barriers enclose space, define it and make…
Air conditioning is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. It’s also killing the 21st
When did indoor air become cold and clean? Air conditioning is one of those inventions that have become so ubiquitous that many in the developed world don’t even realize that…
One of the most unfortunate fault lines in climate change politics today is the lack of cooperation between environmentalists and the national security community. Left-wing climate activists don’t exactly hang…
Is the best way to solve climate change to ‘do nothing?’
When it comes to climate change, it might seem that a book entitled “How to Do Nothing” would not only be irrelevant, but also downright obscene and even dangerous. Not…
Bill Gates has solved many problems in his (professional) life, and in recent decades, he’s been dedicated to the plight of the world’s poor and particularly their health. Through his…
Books on climate change, as diverse as the library is, tend to fall into a couple of categories. There are the field guides and observational accounts that chronicle the destruction…
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Now that summer is forever, here are 6 books on climate change to sharpen your intuitions and models
The climate is finally hitting a climax. Decades of discussions and reports by scientists have yielded pathbreaking works by writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, and today, climate fiction and non-fiction are even becoming global bestselling works. Everyone wants to read about collapse, dystopia, the aftermath — it’s in the very air we breathe after all, what…
A new book aims to blow up assumptions about the best founding teams
There’s a lot of how-to guidance out there when it comes to starting a company, and much of it has reinforced certain beliefs, including that solo founders don’t get very…
Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?
There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past…
Gift Guide: The best books for 2020 recommended by VCs and TechCrunch writers (Part 1)
2020 was a tough year for all of us, but a strong one for books (how often do you get to say that?). Sales are up, driven by lockdowns, boredom,…
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Is the internet advertising economy about to implode?
Advertising drives the modern digital economy. Whether it’s reading news sites like this one or perusing your social media feeds, advertising is the single most important industry that came out of the development of the web. Yet, for all the tens of billions of dollars poured into online advertising just in the United States alone,…
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If we could see alternate realities, would we want to take a look?
Well, here we are. After many weeks (and a somewhat inconsistent publishing schedule), we have arrived at the final story of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection, number nine of nine. It has been a fun journey reading each of these speculative science fiction stories, and I do think they have much to tell TechCrunch readers. Even…
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What is the purpose of belief in a world of innovation?
We are reading the penultimate short story in Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation. Omphalos questions what it means to believe: in our world, in alternative worlds, and in ourselves. Given that beliefs are crucial to everything we do in innovation and science, I thought the theme deeply dovetailed with a lot of what TechCrunch readers care…
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Why you can’t overlook the small details in the pursuit of innovation
This week, we read a very short story, The Great Silence, as we start to head toward the end of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection. This story asks questions about how we connect with nature, and also how to think about innovation and where new ideas come from. We will finish the remaining two stories in…
