Escaping The “Outside Criticism” Trap
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Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
Following: Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy and GPU smuggler
Trump was briefed on the affair and took no action; ~240,000 GPUs were smuggled into China
llm-gemini 0.36
Pluralistic: The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (10 Nov 2026)
Iron Makes Iron
II.
Culture
Lionel Trilling described the place where literature and politics meet as a "dark and bloody crossroads." Bad politics and bad books are buried there
Lionel Trilling described the place where literature and politics meet as a "dark and bloody crossroads." Bad politics a…
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"
“We live in a time and a place when and where taste, inner resourcefulness, and fortitude are neither encouraged nor rewarded”
In medieval times, curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information
III.
Life
I’m on a slow background mission to reverse the othering in my worldview. De-othering
I’m on a slow background mission to reverse the othering in my worldview. De-othering: sive.rs/deothering
Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time
What Makes You Yourself: Earth’s Largest Living Organism and the Paradox of Personhood
De-othering
Carl Sagan on How to Live with the Unknown
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
Hexapodia LXV: The Re-Industrialization of America, with Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
A recording from Brad DeLong's live video
Are RCTs underpowered?
Is the Fed Going to Hike 50 bps?
Tuesday assorted links
On “The Meritocratic Consensus” in Higher Education
VI.
Finance
Tuesday links: one big bet
This is Why You Need a Plan
Is Fund Size Growth in Private Equity a Red Flag?
Research links: developing investment talent
Inflation still needs to be controlled
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
Longtermism For Animals
Making the far future go well for animals should be the top priority of the animal rights movement
The Scariest Recent AI Development
Dario Amodei’s Contemptible Critics
Suggested Readings
Taking Torture Seriously
IX.
Psychology
We need more goat sacrifices
OR: OJ A-OK
Women Have Become More Likely to Marry Men With Less Education Than Themselves
When there is no right answer
Brave Men, Reproductive Effort, Motivation
The art of political decision making
X.
Science
Eric Weinstein & Richard Borcherds: Fields Medalist & Eric Weinstein on the Future of Mathematics
SPONSORS:
Missing the boat on extreme event attribution
What Is a Quantum Field Theory, Really?
XKDR Newsletter - Issue 55
Eric Weinstein & Richard Borcherds: Fields Medalist & Eric Weinstein on the Future of Mathematics
Culture · Feature
USPS Announces Mythical Creatures Stamps for 2027
The US Postal Service recently released a partial list of the stamps it’s putting out in 2027. One of the sets is Mythical Creatures, featuring five cryptids.1 The legend of Mothman has endured for more than six decades, but of the creatures encountered on these stamps, this flying, man-sized, red-e...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.