Dialectic 23 · Tamara Winter
Ideas worth keeping.
A chronological trail through the books, essays, people and references in Tammy Winter's conversation about taste, trust, agency and excellent work.
Early influences
00:00 to 00:16- 00:00Stripe Press
Tammy's publishing home and the thread connecting the conversation.
- 00:05Earth, Wind & Fire · “Boogie Wonderland” · “Fantasy”
Childhood music and formative influences.
- 00:07Atlas · Indie Hackers · Patio11 · Frontier
Early internet, technology and career references.
- 00:09Sasha Darini · Anthropic · Facebook · Pinterest · Stripe
People and places from the world around her work.
- 00:15Cedric Chin · Commoncog
A strong contemporary voice on tacit knowledge, expertise and judgment.
Stripe Press and useful work
00:12 to 00:36- 00:12Working in Public · Nadia Eghbal
Open-source communities and the people who maintain them.
- 00:12The Origins of Efficiency · Ryan Potter
Described as forthcoming in the episode. The transcript is inconsistent about the author's first name.
- 00:12The Maintenance of Everything · Stewart Brand
Maintenance, repair and the systems that keep the world functioning.
- 00:19Nadia Eghbal's announcement writing
An example of writing that makes things happen.
- 00:19The Art of Doing Science and Engineering · Richard Hamming
Tammy's favorite Stripe Press book.
- 00:20“You and Your Research” · Richard Hamming
Take your ambitions seriously. Choose important problems.
- 00:22“On Self-Respect” · Joan Didion
Character, responsibility and knowing the price of your choices.
- 00:27Scaling People · Claire Hughes Johnson
A principles-based guide to management, hiring and operating organizations.
- 00:35“Montaigne” · Virginia Woolf
Communication, friendship, reading and social life.
Trust, taste and cultural capital
01:02 to 01:30- 01:03“Scissor Statements” · Scott Alexander
An explicit recommendation about arguments that split people into opposing interpretations.
- 01:21Nick Whitaker · “Interesting paths are not repeatable, but they rhyme.”
The phrase Tammy uses to describe distinctive careers.
- 01:21Anna Wintour · Pamela Harriman · Esther Cooper Smith
People Tammy aspires to rhyme with. Two spellings are uncertain in the auto-transcript.
- 01:24Queen Camilla · Vogue · Cardi B · Ashley Graham · Stella McCartney · Greta Gerwig
Examples of cultural capital, image-making and lives that resist neat compartments.
- 01:28Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
An example of transatlantic social and political influence.
- 01:28Winston Churchill · the “dollar princesses”
Quiet forms of influence and the social worlds built across the Atlantic.
- 01:30High Growth Handbook · Elad Gil
A founder and operator reference.
- 01:30An Elegant Puzzle · Will Larson
A bestselling book about engineering management.
Making and writing
01:43 to 02:08- 01:43The Making of Prince of Persia · Jordan Mechner
Development journals that show what making something actually looks like.
- 01:51I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup · Scott Alexander
A rabbit hole into the value of following a writer's references.
- 01:52“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” · Gay Talese
A canonical profile built without Talese interviewing Sinatra.
- 01:55Ryan Orbuch · Nora Ephron
Private correspondence and a writer Tammy had not read yet.
- 01:58Bleak House · Charles Dickens
A demanding classic that rewards patience.
- 01:58Middlemarch · George Eliot
Another example of a long work with an unfamiliar rhythm.
- 01:59Madame Bovary · Gustave Flaubert
The clearest recommendation in the difficult-classics thread.
- 02:01Up from Slavery · Booker T. Washington
An autobiography used as an example of agency through action.
- 02:03Theodore Roosevelt
A life Tammy uses as a source of borrowed courage.
- 02:07Christopher Alexander · A Pattern Language
An influence on finding elegant, reusable language for recurring human problems.
Start with the short reading queue: Hamming, Didion, Alexander, Talese, Eghbal, Johnson and Mechner. Timestamps point back to the conversation.