Finished reading and highly recommend Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, written by former black hat hacker turned Wired.com senior editor Kevin Poulsen. Poulsen served five years in prison for computer fraud and turned to journalism on release, eventually starting Wired.com’s security blog Threat Level. Kingpin is a great primer on [...]
Matt Taibbi’s April 2010 Rolling Stone article The Great American Bubble Machine set the foundation for his recent book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. Taibbi’s writing style is direct, at times profane, but never fails to entertain while giving insight into what’s happening within the world of [...]
I don’t know much about the intricacies of Wall Street and the world of subprime mortgage bonds, collateralize debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps, but Michael Lewis’ The Big Short does a excellent job of highlighting what went wrong in the last decade that led to our economic crisis.
Growing up playing soccer and befriending a Bosnian refugee family as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee, Warren St. John’s Outcasts United really really resonated with me.
Steven Johnson’s TED Talk discusses where good ideas come from (the lunchroom). Wired also has a great Q&A with Johnson and Kevin Kelly about their new books, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and What Technology Wants.