How Much Will Gold Fall in a Hot War?
A ten percent jump in oil prices - if it happens - maps into a four percent drop in gold
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
Fast and slow ways to improve your reputation
datasette-llm 0.1a9
Experiments with Monstrousness
Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026)
II.
Culture
The Guide for the Perplexed is a perplexing work — its difficulty is, in part, the point. Can fluent English do it justice?
The Guide for the Perplexed is a perplexing work — its difficulty is, in part, the point. Can fluent English do it justi…
Drunk or sober, but especially drunk, Edgar Allan Poe acted against his own interests. He turned the mystery of why into art
The hottest class at Harvard? Humanities 10, where phones are banned, attendance is mandatory, and the readings are dense
Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beauty?
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
III.
Life
Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among…
Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song
Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends
Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World
LLMs can now easily make great charts
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
The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
Looking at life, work, & the world here in & from the vantage point of Berkeley, California; today’s burning question: s…
RIP Bill Nordhaus
William Nordhaus, RIP
And so it begins…
Saturday assorted links
VI.
Finance
Saturday links: walking a fine line
Saturdays we catch up with the non-finance related items that we didn’t get to earlier in the week. You can check out...
Its time to build!
Earnings & Expectations
Friday links: new challenges
Confidence isn’t about having more, it’s about calibrating the right amount
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
Intelligence and Attention
New paper on Husserl, Illich, Hugh of St. Victor, Plato, and more.
“AIs Without Minds” Without Convincing Arguments
Suggested Readings
Hell is Suspicious
Ban Foie Gras!
IX.
Psychology
Separating the art from the artist
Podcast with Robert Wright
Aligned, but with whom?
Cornell 7, Illicit Activities, Violence Interventions
Fake it ‘til you make it (and then keep faking it)
Quiet Luxury for Academics
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?
Life · Feature
Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations
Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our poems...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.