Welcome to Intellectual Rabbit Hole!
We created this site to bring together people that like to learn. This is not a high-brow academic site—our goal is to keep things simple and fun. We hope you find the content interesting and, at times, applicable to your daily life.
To that end, our only rule is: we don’t talk about politics. We want to foster positive collaboration in the community with a focus on what we can do to make life better.
If you are interested, please sign up for our free monthly newsletter. And as always, let us know if you have good content you’d like us to share with the community or ideas about how we can make this project better.
So, if you like to learn, here are some of our favorite things to get you started. Have a good journey!
Life
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. By William B. Irvine.
Stoicism is in vogue nowadays, but there seem to be misconceptions swirling around about the philosophy. Stoicism is not about apathy, Mr. Irvine argues, but creating joy. This book is a helpful manual for dealing with the challenges of life and forms the core of the philosophy we discuss on the site.
Math / Tech
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. By Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic.
Like writing, there is a temptation to make things overly complicated when presenting data. Ms. Nussbaumer Knaflic gives a treasure trove of practical advice to improving your graphs that she devised while at Google. It’s a great book to have handy at the office. I find her lecture (below) on the topic, where you can see her principles in action, even better than the book.
History
Tides of History Podcast. By Patrick Wyman, Ph.D.
The Tides of History podcast covers Europe and the Middle East from 1300-1600 and now pre-modern history. Mr. Wyman entertainingly narrates historical subjects without losing academic integrity or pontificating about current events. He is unafraid to conjecture about broad historical questions and diversifies episodes between high politics, environmental science, and peasant life.
Culture
The Chef Show. By Roy Choi and Jon Favreau.
I never found food or food shows interesting. The Chef Show, however, is great. Roy Choi (Kogi BBQ Taco Truck) and Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man and The Mandalorian) take their friendship to culinary heights. They capture why cooking is an art without dramatizing the subject. The show is a fun look into the culinary world and the genuine friendship of two brilliant people.
Cool Competitions
Looking to take action?
Check out the Innocentive Challenge Board. Formed as a “global brainstorm,” Innocentive allows organizations to offer rewards to anyone that can help solve their biggest problems. Many of the winners are not specialists in the problem topic, so don’t let that deter you! Or, if data science is your thing, Kaggle hosts machine learning competitions for prize money.