4 ways to build a human company in the age of machines

This series, in which founders and managers openly share their failures, falls under the principle “be ugly” and is a great example of how embracing the messiness of work can not only be cathartic but indeed beautiful. As my friend, the entrepreneur Chris Chavez likes to say: "Beauty comes from turning shit into fertilizer.: In business and in life.

Consistent behavior is widely considered a universal trait of effective leaders, but in this 1992 essay, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski heralds inconsistency as a basic human right and insists on the essentially unquantifiable nature of human beings. In fact, he believes that inconsistency is vital to the moral integrity of societies: "Total consistency is tantamount in practice to fanaticism, while inconsistency is the source of tolerance."

This stunning 2013 movie by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Navigating the remote territory between Frederico Fellini and Peter Greenaway, it is not only an eccentric homage to the eternal city, but also an exuberant celebration of wisdom, art, eros, romance, and love—in other words, the beauty of things that don’t scale.

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Since we are talking about beauty, no reading list can be complete without a book about the "beautiful game:" soccer (or football). Franklin Foer’s passionate and highly entertaining account of arch rivalries, fan tribes, and other cultural underpinnings of this global phenomenon provides a delightful tour de force through the folklore and poetry of the world’s most popular sport for both the fan and the neutral observer.

Voyager is NASA’s mission to explore interstellar space. On board, the spacecraft is the Golden Record that carries an arguably very subjective compilation of mankind’s finest music, including, among other tunes, various works of Bach, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a wedding song from Peru, and "Dark Was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson. The record is meant to portray the ingenuity and diversity of life on Earth, as a "message in a bottle" for extraterrestrial life. But with the rise of AI, it may well turn from a hopeful greeting to a melancholic reminder of what it means to be human.