Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
Don't dethrone consciousness!
LLMs aren't conscious (and thinking they are is culturally dangerous)
OpenAI Offers A New Policy Blueprint
Quoting Andreas Kling
What LLM speed looks like when generating output
II.
Culture
"AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting," says Malin Hay, "as well as a lot of promising"
"AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting," says Malin Hay, "as we…
There are two types of anti-woke intellectuals. The first type criticizes ideas; the second is consumed by them
Psilocybin is doing what decades of philosophy couldn't: turning committed materialists into reluctant mystics
Harold Bloom, flatterer. John Ashbery was “THE POET ABSOLUTE,” yet A.R. Ammons’s work was “larger and better” — and then there was Henri Cole
Denis Johnson's life was a mess. His prose, somehow, was immaculate. How to explain the distance between life and art?
III.
Life
Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All…
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
Einstein and the Eagle: How Relativity Is Saving Earth’s Rarest Raptor
The Three Elements of the Good Life
Some Beliefs Are Load-Bearing
IV.
Design
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
January 2026
Use the saw, fear the saw
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment
V.
Economics
A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia
In his autobiography "Born to Be Wired," Warner board member and billionaire John Malone describes how he helped turn Am…
How Benjamin Franklin innovated to prevent counterfeiting of US currency notes
Tyler and Alex Speak to OpenAI
America, the Inessential Nation
Has Gold Lost Its Safe Haven Status?
VI.
Finance
A Second Look at CAIE: Correcting What I Got Wrong About Calamos’s Strategy
When a consulting client first asked my opinion on the Calamos U.S.
10 Friday AM Reads
Six days to go…
Revisiting the SpaceX Valuation: A Post-Prospectus Update!
AI Is Growing the Pie — But Not Sharing It Equally
VII.
History
CHINA: THE THREE MINDS
Understanding China: Part II
Negative Covenant
Broken Mirror
CHINA: BIRTH OF THE DRAGON
A Metacritique of Palestine
VIII.
Philosophy
Correction
About a year ago, in my article The Grisly Return of Holocaust Denial, I stated that Eric Hunt kidnapped Eli Wiesel.
Thought-Terminating Jargon
Right-libertarians must believe in God. But if they do, they are doomed!
Dissertation Defense Video + Digital Essay
On family affection
IX.
Psychology
Zigging to the bottom
How can a free, competitive market collapse into every player offering the same unsatisfactory offer? A story of three p…
Official Corruption, Obsession, Hidden Crimes
The creative power of not knowing
Is parenthood selfish or selfless? It’s both.
She's the Monster. He's the Villain.
X.
Science
We're Simulated. AI Is Conscious. And We Can't Win.
The simulation, consciousness, free will, and AGI, with Roman Yampolskiy
The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics
Janna Levin on the Shape of Reality
Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime
Working on vs. Solving
Culture · Feature
Summer Fridays, Open Thread
I’m observing summer Fridays here at KDO again this year, which means I (mostly) won’t be posting here on Fridays. If past years are any guide, this doesn’t actually have too much of an effect on how much I work or post…more of a redistribution of time & effort. But it’s nice to have the extra non-w...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.