College Deserves to Be Expensive
Don't think you can slash costs to a better education.
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
Introducing: Qualiaphobic AI
And a good future for humanity
Jensen's Affairs • Is His Chinese Mistress a Spy?
Technology as a Search Problem
[Note] Crosswords + FOSS = ❤️
II.
Culture
Riding the Rails With America’s Last Train-Hoppers....
Riding the Rails With America’s Last Train-Hoppers. “There are still people today who risk injury and arrest to climb ab…
The corkscrew car jump from the Bond film The Man With...
‘This Is an Insane Scandal’: How Jensen Huang’s Downfall Could Change Everything
“Today’s rich people are richer than ever, and that seems...
Janet Malcolm’s journalistic persona was terrifyingly sharp. But her personal letters? “Messy, confusing, repetitive, and frequently boring”
III.
Life
How to Hear the Song of Life
“When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in one of his least known, most beautiful essays, “th…
Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are
True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again
The Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture
How Not to Waste Your Life
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
My Barcelona talk on AI
The post My Barcelona talk on AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The great economic theorist, Richard Posner (1939-2026)
Thursday assorted links
China’s Hidden Edge in Manufacturing.
On Richard Posner
VI.
Finance
The Bear Markets
Bull markets vs. bear markets. The post The Bear Markets appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...
Thursday links: intellectual honesty
Longform links: demographic assumptions
Key principles for building a scalable trading model
Richard Posner death and the economic analysis of the law
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
Ignore Last Email
Don’t fill out the consultation form yet--it’s unclear what the best alternative stunning method is
You Can’t Abolish The Profit Motive
Talking With Daniel Munoz (IN PERSON!)
Broadtermism
Evolutionary ethics and how we treat strangers
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
The Fix is Still In
The DOE Climate Working Group is talking about revising their disgraceful report. It won’t fix the numerous problems wit…
Dan Freed: What Is Quantum Field Theory, Really?
Quantum Gravity & the Origin of Mass Explained FROM SCRATCH
Eric Weinstein & Richard Borcherds: Fields Medalist & Eric Weinstein on the Future of Mathematics
Missing the boat on extreme event attribution
Culture · Feature
Map of New England Places Everybody Pronounces Wrong
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback: You’re mixing accent with correct pronunciation. It’...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.