How to Think About Marine Le Pen
Le Pen will be like Meloni - a toothless administrator constrained by too much debt
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
[Article] /domains - a /slashpage for people who buy too many domain names
I buy too many domain names. So to help keep track of them... and to let the world see how bad my purchasing problem has…
Deus ex machina
GitHub Octoverse 2026
Amazon's Apple Strategy • Apple's Touching MacBook Backtrack
II.
Culture
Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beauty?
Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beau…
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality was not his “kind of history.” Nor was it Karl Marx’s
James Fessenden was indolent, wrote little, and inspired two of the most charismatic intellectuals of his time
"You can fight the premise that AI is a better writer than the best human, but you’ll be whistling past the graveyard of dead writers and metaphors"
III.
Life
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
"It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger."
What It Takes to Be Free
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
IV.
Design
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
August 2026
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
V.
Economics
CROSSPOST: JOSH BUSBY & DUCK OF MINERVA: Israel's Dead End
Is America chained to Netanyahu? Josh Busby of the Duck of Minerva says yes, and that it is costing the US dearly. But,…
Errors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
How is AI shaping economic research?
Wednesday assorted links
Do Prediction Markets Create Information?
VI.
Finance
The Anthropic Prospectus Arrives: My (but not the) IPO valuation!
I am a dabbler, by nature, moving on from topic to topic, but this year, I have spent more time than usual on AI, but th…
Wednesday links: being held accountable
Personal finance links: finding enough
Private Equity for Pension Plans? A New Look at Who Really Benefits
Animal Spirits: Why Baby Boomers Have All the Money
VII.
History
The Art of Blaming Israel For Everything
Notes Toward an Autopsy of Anti-Zionism
The future of Britain in 7 maps
Brotherist Without Being a Brother
The history of Britain in 7 maps
Intifada Everywhere All at Once
VIII.
Philosophy
Only Effective Altruists Should be Anti-Effective Altruism
The only situation in which you should think that the effective altruism movement has been bad is if you share many EA v…
AI writing in philosophy
The Argument For God From Knowledge
Epictetus argues against the death penalty
Unpopular Effective Altruist Views Are Simply Correct
IX.
Psychology
Cornell 7, Illicit Activities, Violence Interventions
Links and Recommendations
Fake it ‘til you make it (and then keep faking it)
Quiet Luxury for Academics
Pseudobeliefs
Poor People Lie Upward, Rich People Lie Downward
X.
Science
Consciousness Isn't in the Cortex
Mark Solms on feelings, dreams, and the brainstem
Off-grid data centers have 60-80% higher emissions
Scott Aaronson: “I Heard That a Robot Solved the Math Problem You Worked On”
Scott Aaronson: “I Heard That a Robot Solved the Math Problem You Worked On”
What is a Differentiable Manifold?
Culture · Feature
The Moving Image Archive
The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections. The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifi...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.