Essays:

• This Is Water by David Foster Wallace -- a thought-provoking commencement speech about empathy and the meaning of education.
• Normalization of Deviance in Software by Dan Luu -- a great essay about how broken practices become the norm, instead of getting fixed.

Books:

• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver -- a captivating tour of what we can and can't accurately predict.
• The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich -- so funny that I started recommending it to friends.

Podcasts:

• Birthstory by Radiolab -- a fascinating and disturbing look at the market for surrogate pregnancies.
• Brown box by Radiolab -- a look inside an online retailer's fulfillment center, and what it takes to give you next-day delivery.