The Antichrist Has a Balance Sheet
Peter Thiel fears the universal machinery of control. He has helped build some of its most important components.
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
The AI election that wasn't
Voters have other things on their minds — for now. PLUS: OpenAI’s clever policy to fight deepfakes, and the Anthropic S-…
Why agents take unexpected routes
Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge
I am a Prompt addict
II.
Culture
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality were not his “kind of history.” Nor were they Karl Marx’s
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality were not his “kind of history.” Nor were…
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"
We may daydream about a frictionless world, but consider tribology — the science of interacting surfaces — and you’ll realize that’s nonsense
Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old epic, is violent and sexually explicit. Why have translators mostly made it sound lofty?
III.
Life
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
"One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy."
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work
20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
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
Between South Korea and South Vietnam
A review of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War”
500,000 “Lines of Code” to Try to Track the Economy: TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL
Tuesday assorted links
Does the Constitution Forbid Racial Discrimination by the Federal Government?
What AI progress teaches us about human psychology
VI.
Finance
Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions
Elizabeth Holmes and the power of self-deception. The post Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions appeared first on A Weal…
The movement of gold trading to Hong Kong
Bond history in context
Tuesday links: being distinctly human
The Case Against the Yen Bears
VII.
History
The future of Britain in 7 maps
How geography could shape the country’s future
Brotherist Without Being a Brother
The history of Britain in 7 maps
Intifada Everywhere All at Once
Ye Have Troubled Me
VIII.
Philosophy
The Argument For God From Knowledge
We know many things. That makes it likelier that God exists.
Epictetus argues against the death penalty
Unpopular Effective Altruist Views Are Simply Correct
Impactful Places to Donate
Suggested Readings
IX.
Psychology
Pseudobeliefs
If there’s a master key to everything I’ve written on this blog, it’s the prefix “pseudo.”
Poor People Lie Upward, Rich People Lie Downward
A Guilty Person’s Idea of How an Innocent Person Would Behave
On cyber-security and cyber-stupidity
The greater of two (or more) evils
X.
Science
Off-grid data centers have 60-80% higher emissions
A rush to power is leading data centers to install the least efficient and leakiest types of fossil gas generators rathe…
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?
How not to detect warming acceleration
Life · Feature
What It Takes to Be Free
We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance d...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.