Books:

• Bright-sided was an entertaining look at what happens when positive thinking gets applied in delusional amounts. The tagline is: "To complainers everywhere: Turn up the volume!"

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was more creative and more touching than I expected. Favorite scenes: Typing one's life story on a typewriter with no ink, and the story about the Sixth Borough.

• A Guide to the Good Life was an accessible introduction to Roman Stoicism. It's surprising how much this ancient philosophy has in common with the modern CBT approaches described in "Feeling Good" by David Burns.

Cool stuff online:

• About the monorepo at Google. AKA: everything you think you know from working in startups is wrong.

• The badass insanity that is /r/churning.

• Mystery signal from a helicopter -- an illuminating peek at what a good signals analyst can do.

• Companies in Silicon Valley working on flying cars. I had no idea this was happening. Also, check out this incredible video about pedal-powered flight.

• Some really amazing and unusual designs for wooden clocks and other mechanisms.