Links
In an attempt at good internet citizenship, this page provides a view into the most interesting things I’ve come across each month.
January 2026
A lot of population numbers are fake: David Oks
Death Pact: Andy Kirkpatrick. On unbelayed roped movement aka ‘moving together’
NYT Alex Honnold Interview.
Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’: Nature.
Confessions of a former “studies say” guy: Slow Boring.
Did Hunter S. Thompson Really Kill Himself? NYT
Stochastic Martyrdom: Adorable and Harmless. “Stochastic martyrdom is the encouragement of activist tactics that will predictably get activists hurt or killed when applied at scale, coupled with false assurances of personal safety for the people employing them.” I don’t love how ICE actions are framed in this essay but I think Stochastic Martyrdom seems to be developing. Maybe it always has been though. Someone is Using AI to Exploit Lonely Writers on Substack: Modern Shakers. This is bad. Heavy Is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments: James Hibberd,
The Hollywood Reporter. Man… we’re never getting The Winds of Winter, much less A Dream of Spring.
Why are intelligent people more liberal? Aporia Magazine.
SOTA on Bay Area House Party: Astral Codex Ten.
Why I’m a Quaker: Ozy Brennan. This makes me want to attend a Quaker service. Seems cool.
Twins’ Peaks: The Gilbertson Brothers Want to Rewrite Your Country’s Map: NYT.
Duke University is a hedge fund with a health system, a huge research enterprise & a hobby of college: Don Taylor.
I Was Kidnapped by Idiots: Elizabeth Tsurkov, The Atlantic
Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall: Coffee with Clio. Like reading Suetonius, this highlights how the past is a foreign country. Imperial Chinese viewpoints on the Roman Empire.
Breakthroughs rare and decreasing: Sam Harismony.
Bob Weir, Guitarist and Founding Member of the Grateful Dead, Dies at 78: NYT. RIP Bobby.
How Our White House Photographer Finds New Angles on the Oval Office: NYT.
The Final Offshoring: Jacob Rintamaki. Tries to be Situational Awareness but for robotics. Broadly fails.
LLM poetry and the “greatness” question: Anecdotal Value by Hollis Robbins.
Ordinary People: Lift High the Muse. A much more sane take on normies that is a response to jenn’s post below.
In My Misanthropy Era: jenn on Lesswrong. This may sound like a dunk, but it’s not intended to be: this is one of the most Lesswrong-y Lesswrong posts I’ve ever read. Someone realizes they exist in an intellectual bubble of Rationalists, thinks to herself “maybe getting more in touch with the common man would fix me”, and decides to do this by… attending an in-person philosophy meetup. She proceeds to be horrified by the level of discourse at the event.
Notes on Afghanistan: Matt Lakeman. I can’t believe I had not come across Lakeman’s writing before. I can’t say I had time to read every word of this behemoth of a post, but I did poke around at some of his other posts. Having spent more time in Spain than in any other foreign country I enjoyed that post in particular.
No survival instincts: Chad Nauseam. Glad that I engage in some hobbies that force me to develop some amount of survival instincts. “There may be a point in your life when you want to leave the tutorial zone and do things whose safety cannot be assumed by the mere fact that they exist.”
‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World: NYT.
Five(ish) charts that give some context to Venezuelan oil: Hannah Ritchie.
Ads and gas pumping rate: NoMagicPill. Great citizen science project.
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership: Astral Codex Ten. It’s interesting that the Permanent Underclass joke is “preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity.”
December 2025
Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price: Mark Johnson and Saumya Khandelwal, The Washington Post.
Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts: eukaryote, Lesswrong. The doodle is easy to read, the polished work is busy.
Cassandra (metaphor): Wikipedia.
The Kill Pause: Andy Kirkpatrick. More thoughts on Balin Miller’s death. I’ve experienced a couple of awful moments while climbing and skiing of “oh shit, I have seriously fucked this up, and I only am avoiding suffering the consequences of fucking up thanks to dumb luck.”
All I can say is that I’ve had a few moments like this, not when I thought I might die, but when I knew I was about to die (but didn’t), and all I can say is it’s not how you think it would be. There is no fear, or anger, or bitterness, not even terror. There’s only acceptance. There’s no fight. There’s only peace. Maybe it’s the chemicals in your head that make you feel this way, but I hope it’s more than that.
Was Balin’s death avoidable? Yes, but so are most climbing deaths, and death in general. It wasn’t a single failure, like he just ‘rapped off the end of his rope’ or failed to tie a knot in the end. He died like most climbers die: he’d grown too comfortable with what he was doing and where he was, and he rushed when he should have taken his time. He thought it was over. He let his guard down. It wasn’t.
And so it goes.
Reasoning from price changes. I read this article by HumanInvariant that took me down a rabbit hole of posts about reasoning from price changes: Never reason from a price change; Reasoning from a price change, example #341; Never reason from a price change, example #305; Imagine a bigger Seattle. I will be trying to incorporate this idea into the way I think, but it feels like a hard mistake to avoid.
The Real Housewives of Moscow: Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic.
Comment, Don’t Message: Jeff Kaufman. I agree that public communication is preferable.
The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking? Robert Rooney, McSweeney’s. “I want every eight-year-old to look at this and think, ‘Someday, I will destroy my father’s confidence with pure logic.’”
Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually A Thing? Shayla Love, The New Yorker. Is anything in psychology safe from the replication crisis? (no)
The Hedgehog and the Fox: Isaiah Berlin. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
The Triumph of the Middle-Aged Athlete: Sally Jenkins, The Atlantic.
The battle to stop clever people betting: The Economist. We can’t restrict or ban sports betting fast enough, though Pandora’s Box has already been opened, hooking a ton of people already.
Front-Loading Giving Because of Anthropic Donors? Jeff Kaufman. I won’t be doing this myself but I appreciate the thinking.
Keep the Robots Out of the Gym: Daniel Miessler. This post is a good articulation of my current feelings toward the use of AI in daily life and work.
A Medical Mystery from Postwar Germany: Neal Stephenson.
November 2025
Competitive Ethics: Milan Cvitkovic. Interesting implications for both demographics and AI safety.
Quantum suicide and immortality: Wikipedia. See also Erik Hoel’s The Invincible Human Moth.
The realities of being a pop star: Charli xcx. With all due respect to Charli, not great writing, but an interesting perspective.
Famous Writers’ Sex Lives and Other Questions: Alexander Sorondo. I feel the same way about Roman Emperors, artists, politicians, philosophers, really any Great Man of History—my mind feels compelled to remember the sordid.
The Ordinary and Extraordinary Struggle of Social Life: Perceiving, Understanding, and Connecting With Other Minds: Juliana Schroeder.
Inventing the Dishwasher: Erin Braid, Works in Progress.
Rayleigh Scattering: Wikipedia
Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Twists and turns in the story of learned avoidance: Lesley T. MacNeil. Big if true. Would like to understand what the proposed mechanism is here.
What happened to Pine Gate Renewables? Maeve Allsup.
Pandora’s Box, from Hesiod’s Works and Days. See also Wikipedia, and remind yourself that the final thing left in the box before it was shut by Zeus was Hope.
AI Powered NIMBYism: The Guardian. :(
The Monks in the Casino: Derek Thompson.
Warren Buffet’s Final Berkshire Hathaway Letter.
Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth: Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine. I feel about Cormac McCarthy’s brain how many people seem to feel about von Neumann’s brain. He wrote sentences that are challenging for me to imagine coming from the mind of a human being.
Names of Soviet Origin: Wikipedia. Mel as an acronym of Marx, Engels, Lenin. Unreal.
Why I stopped being a climate catastrophist: Breakthrough Journal. A good piece in the category of some recent conversations I’ve had with friends about how climate change has fallen out of the milieu.
Nursing Home Gossip: Sympathetic Opposition. I’m in the same boat: “I will not spend my final days in the nursing-home cafeteria with the same people I sat with in my elementary school cafeteria. The tradeoff seems worth it right now—I think my elementary school classmates and I are mutually glad not to have to deal with each other all the time. But I will spool out my final days in the company of old women who will never look young to me, whose pleasures and tragedies I will not know.”
October 2025
The Bay Area is Cursed: Sascha Chapin. More bay research in advance of my visit. It’s so funny to read posts like these because: the author still lives there! everyone wants to live there! But there’s got to be a grain of truth all these haters are gesturing towards.
Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman & MJ Lenderman Breakup Essay: Vulture
I’m a food capitalist. My husband is a food communist: Cartoons Hate Her. No surprises here but I am a food capitalist, mostly because I eat a ton of food.
What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier: Ai Weiwei
Annual 2025 Opinions on Solar: Jenny Chase.
America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan—but our zoning laws make them illegal: Abi Olvera
Hyperstimuli are understimulating: Sympathetic Opposition. On the difference between liking things and craving things. Really enjoy this framework.
Notes of many things: Philosophy Bear.
The Goon Squad: Harper’s. The online response to this article was a mix of dooming (American needs a religious revival! We’re lost!) and minimizing (this article is navel-gazing moral-panic slop!). As with most things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
The Traveler: Wallace Stegner.
The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov”: Karl Ove Knausgaard/The New Yorker. I’m going as a Performative Mail for Halloween. I should probably print this out and carry it around for my costume. Recommended.
Alexei Navalny’s final statement in court
Tech PACs are closing in one the almonds: ACX. Follow up to a canonical SSC post. This feels important (and concerning).
2C-B: Beautiful compound, difficult to dose: Andrés Gómez-Emilsson. I love reading trip reports about weird drugs.
This Map Is Not Upside Down: Maps.com
Argentina Could Be A Superpower: Uncharted Territories.
Slow Pulse Boy: Mark Twight. Remarks on the passing of Balin Miller, a generational climbing talent that died at the age of 23, by one of the people that inspired him to climb like he did. Sadly, this is another instance of death via rappelling. Tie knots at the end of your ropes. Mark’s conclusion: “Balin’s on the other side of the window now and our world is darker for his death but we can still look up and be inspired by the shooting star that lit up the night sky.”
How A City Awash in Garbage Is Trying to Take Out the Trash: NYT. Doing research for my first visit to SF/Oakland next month.
Five Technological Achievements (That we won’t see anytime soon): Doug Muir
The New World: Colossus. An absolutely gushing article about Joshua Kushner/Thrive Capital. I mean, they are just choking on it here.
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear: Jack Clark.
‘Crazy, Right?’: More PE Funds Than McDonald’s Signals Pressure: Bloomberg. I still can’t believe that this is true.
What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?: Construction Physics
September 2025
An Ancient Poem Against Sundials (250 B.C.): Pessimist’s Archive/Plautus. I side with those that think this is satire.
Why You Should Eat Meat, Even If You Hate Factory Farming: Kat Woods. I’ve been a pescatarian for four years for ethical reasons, but in the last month or so I’ve been feeling a lot of frustration with my diet. I have a pretty high training volume and often find myself hungry and underfueled, despite eating a LOT. I often wonder if I had been eating meat for the last few years if and how my athletic performance would be different. I’ve been trying to eat more wild-caught fish but I may need to experiment with some other changes…
The Lost Art of Pickpocketing: Slate
Five Days with Geese, America’s Most Thrilling Young Rock Band: GQ. 3D Country is my favorite album of the decade so far. I like Geese’s newest album too and I’m glad to see them having commercial success.
How Common is Accidental Invention?: Construction Physics
Terrance Tao thread on large vs small groups.
This Conquistador Changed History. Neglect Haunts His Tomb in Mexico: NYT
The Sagrada Família Takes Its Final Shape: The New Yorker. When I visited Barcelona in 2017, a ticketing error meant that I couldn’t visit the inside of the church. I think it’s admirable that such a monument is still being built.
A Group of Socialists Created a Hit Game That Tore Them Apart: NYT
On Keeping a Notebook: Joan Didion
you can just do stuff: Alice Maz
Omniscient Entities: Human Invariant
Love is the most Niche Compliment: Nohn’s Garden. It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that giving out compliments is both free and one of the easiest ways to make someone (and probably yourself) happy.
Knowledge of your tools is required: Nohn’s Garden
How People Use ChatGPT: National Bureau of Economic Research. Skim for the data visualizations in here, if anything.
Hosting a Website on a Disposable Vape: BogdanTheGeek’s Blog. As a not-technical person, I am endless impressed by technical people.
Inside the Battle to Protect Time: Financial Times.
Kilian Jornet’s States of Elevation: Run
LLMs will be like Ozempic for Golf: House of Strauss
The War on Artificial Ice: Pessimist’s Archive
August 2025
Your Review: Alpha School: ACX.
The Whispering Earring: Scott Alexander. I doubt I would be able to resist ignoring the first piece of advice.
Why Top Olympic Athletes Use Baking Soda to Boost Performance: Outside
The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries: IEEE
A Medical-History Museum Contends with Its Collection of Human Remains: The New Yorker.
Catullus 16: Wikipedia. Why didn’t they teach us this poem in my public high school Latin classes?
Different Worlds: SSC. Also see my post It’s All Relative.
The Grugbrained CEO: Sam Rodriques. In this time of tumult in my industry of clean energy, I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Stamina Succeeds: Robin Hanson
What Does Starvation Feel Like?: The EA Forum
Consider working more hours and taking more stimulants: Arjun Panickssery.
The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws: Roger’s Bacon. Useful resource.
Phobos Over Mars: Andrea Luck.
The Inner Ring: C.S. Lewis. I try and read this essay every month or two, hoping that eventually its message will embed itself into my psyche.
No One Is Really Working: Justifying the High Salaries of Early-Career Professionals: Human Invariant.
But Did You Really Climb It?: Semi-Rad. Climbing things is kind of ridiculous.
The Murder of the Impossible: Reinhold Messner
Advice for Activists from the History of Environmentalism: Lesswrong. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s gutting of clean energy policy underscores the importance of some of these suggestions.
July 2025
Last Soldiers of an Imperial [Japanese] Army Have a Warning for Young Generations: NYT
The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing Is Dead Wrong: Derek Thompson
Tax the Tourists: Slow Boring
The mysteries of Roman inscriptions are being solved with a new AI tool: The Art Newspaper. I am a sucker for anything that promises to increase our knowledge of antiquity. See also the Vesuvius Challenge.
Why Do Victims of Massacres Go Quietly to Their Deaths?: Ben Landau-Taylor
Ten Mile Creek Tailings Ponds: Center for Land Use Interpretation, and PHOTOS: What the Climax mine leaves behind: The Colorado Sun. I drive past this mine and tailings pond a lot in the winter. It took me years to look up what was going on in the iridescent pools alongside the highway.
Are Volcanoes a Risk to Solar-Dominated Grids?: Austin Vernon. TLDR: No.
The Jackpot Age: Lesswrong. Important background for our current cultural moment and relevant to my friend Shreyas’s new substack, Dopamine Markets.
What Virtue is Undersupplied Today?: Nan Ransohoff. She answers “vision” which I think is a strong contender (see my post The Asymmetry of Destruction).
Inflight Auctions: Jeff Kaufman. Finance is cool. Markets in everything.
Why We’re Surrounding Our Kids with AI: Second Voice. From the weird parents featured in that pronatalist article. I am concerned for the future.
Cargo Airships are Happening: Eli Dourado.
Population growth or decline will have little impact on climate change: Hannah Ritchie. I’ve been on a multi-year quest to get my friends who don’t want to have kids because of climate change to abandon that intellectually vacant take and this provides more evidence against it.
Don’t Eat Honey: Bentham’s Bulldog. Interesting, though I'm doubtful about the conclusion, especially after reading the comments.
Most Businesses Don’t Work That Way: Not Not Talmud.
The Challenge of Building New Cities: Inside The Satmar Hassidic Takeover of Bloomingburg: Not Not Talmud
Selling chunks of your life: Footnotes from the Ragged Frontier.
Moby Dick: Just the Takeaways: Footnotes from the Ragged Frontier.
Testosterone Gave Me My Life Back: Cate Hall. I find reports of people’s experimentation with hormones, trip reports from strange drugs, etc. endlessly fascinating.
June 2025
Will Jesus Christ Return in an Election Year?: Lesswrong
Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?: The Post-Suburban Future
When I’m 84: The World Still Needs Ringo Starr: The Atlantic
The Freedman’s Story: William Parker Recalls How He Escaped Slavery: The Atlantic. Incredible primary source account of a slave’s escape and resistance. Must-read. I found this just as compelling as Frederick Douglass’s autobiography.
Meet Oklo, the Earth’s Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor: IAEA
The Great Onion Corner and the Futures Market: NPR. Finance is cool.
I Was A Juror on a Murder Trial: Thing of Things
The World’s Hardest Bluffing Game: The Atlantic. I would like to spend time learning more about this game some day.
If the moon were only one pixel: Josh Worth
Come and See: Wikipedia. I watched this movie on a plane for my book club. The story behind the movie is as compelling as the movie itself in many ways.