The start-up challenge in Europe: Part Deux
On Tuesday, I wrote about a study by the OECD that compared start-up financing in the EU and the US.
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
Gemini Decisions API
Gemini Decisions API Google join Jev and OpenAI in the decision model category with "Gemini Decision 1". This new model…
Nathaniel at WordCamp Canada
Browse tools.simonwillison.net by tag
llm 0.37.2
II.
Culture
An anthology that merely reflects the market amounts to a passive index fund. The editor’s job is to pick winners. David Lehman explains
An anthology that merely reflects the market amounts to a passive index fund. The editor’s job is to pick winners. David…
Critics and biographers alike have tiptoed around a momentous force in John Berger’s writing: sex
Lionel Trilling described the place where literature and politics meet as a "dark and bloody crossroads." Bad politics and bad books are buried there
Anthropologists love to debate: Is their field insufficiently reflexive, too reflexive, too relativistic, or too subservient to dominant norms? Enough!
"Academics routinely betray their best selves and lapse into a tendentious moralism when they enter the wider world of American political debate"
III.
Life
How Not to Waste Your Life
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that…
I’m on a slow background mission to reverse the othering in my worldview. De-othering
Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are
Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time
What Makes You Yourself: Posidonia Australis, Pando, and the Paradox of Personhood
IV.
Design
Fortune Telling and Speculative Design
Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
August 2026
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
V.
Economics
What is culture?
What it is, what it is not and why it matters
Richard Posner, RIP…
Immaculate Disinflation
Bob Dylan’s Very Best Songs
Experimentally validated digital twins
VI.
Finance
Wednesday links: an article of faith
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon
The map of quant strategies
Are the World’s Cheapest Stocks an Opportunity?
Personal finance links: shrinking spending opportunities
VII.
History
For More Than Three Decades, Qatar Has Flourished by Playing All Sides
A strategy of means, not ends
Why Russia had serfs
The Unfinished Drama of Two Histories
Yet More Flying Notes From Egypt
The US Election in 6 maps
VIII.
Philosophy
Talking With Daniel Munoz (IN PERSON!)
A recording from Bentham's Bulldog's live video
Broadtermism
Evolutionary ethics and how we treat strangers
Longtermism For Animals
The Scariest Recent AI Development
IX.
Psychology
Finding inspiration in death
My childhood fascination with “The Economist” obituary
Manly Jobs, Signal Inflation, Sexual Passion
We need more goat sacrifices
Women Have Become More Likely to Marry Men With Less Education Than Themselves
When there is no right answer
X.
Science
Quantum Gravity & the Origin of Mass Explained FROM SCRATCH
The final part of Philip Mannheim’s lecture on quantum gravity and mass
Eric Weinstein & Richard Borcherds: Fields Medalist & Eric Weinstein on the Future of Mathematics
Missing the boat on extreme event attribution
What Is a Quantum Field Theory, Really?
XKDR Newsletter - Issue 55
Culture · Feature
Techno Marching Band!
When someone says “German techno group”, you probably have a pretty good picture in your mind. MEUTE, on the other hand, is an 11-piece techno marching band that plays electronic music with acoustic instruments: tubas, trombones, drums kits, etc. Reset (above) is a single from their new album, KOSMO...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.