A collection of writing, audio, film, and other culture that I’ve enjoyed.
August/September 2021
- A mental model for combatting climate change (Nan Ransohoff; Stripe Climate)
- (Even) more advances by DeepMind – Generally Capable Agents Emerge From Open Ended Play and commentary
- OpenAI Codex – watch the demo
- Covid is going to be with us for a while ($$ WSJ)
- How much do we really know about the ancient world? Gobekli Tepe (BBC) and New Mexico (NYT)
- Ezra Klein and Adam Tooze podcast (NYT)
- A new generation discovers the genius of The Sopranos
- Good New Yorker on Scenes from a Marriage
- Ben Thompson on the Facebook leaks ($$)
June/July 2021
- Profile of Penny Oleksiak, Canadian Olympian
- Delta Kream, the Black Keys
- More advances by DeepMind (AlphaFold)
- Russian gaming culture, “Last year’s Sex with Stalin, a parodic dating simulator that sends you back in time to seduce the Soviet dictator, was criticised by the Russian Communist party as “outrageous and perverted”, recommending it should be banned and its developers arrested.”
- Experiment to watch with MakerDAO, “MakerDAO is one of the original decentralized autonomous organizations, a group of people who harness the (Ethereum) blockchain to make collective decisions about a protocol’s future.”
- Sorry to Bother You
- J.M.W. Turner and Modernity at Tate Britain
- Water Margin podcast, English retelling of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin
May 2021
- A Bull Case for Ethereum (Not Boring) and also Justin Drake on same
- Political evolution or revolution?
- Is civilisation older than we think?
- Kara Walker
- What’s going on here, with this human?
April 2021
- Alex Danco: A technical introduction to Bitcoin for non-technical people
- Ferriss and Srinivasan podcast: 4 hours wasn’t enough and related 1729: the Newsletter that pays you
- Open source primer on Carbon Dioxide Removal technology, a potentially highly underrated opportunity. Michael Nielsen on how one form (direct air capture) may be feasible at scale.
- Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ : An Analysis and Close Reading by Dana Gioia
March 2021
- How The West Lost Covid-19
- Unlocking the Covid Code
- Moderation in Infrastructure (Stratechery) and background interviews
- Matt Clancy: “Instead, [the papers] show that a decline in science leads to a reduction in the use of science by technology, and an increase in science leads to an increase in the use of science by technology (and also that more science-based technology seems to be more valuable).”
February 2021
- Soros: Fallibility, Reflexivity, and the Human Uncertainty Principle
- We Have Entered the Climate Decade
- Inside The Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court
- Ferrante Review
- Audio remains underrated. And an example with the Boss and the former boss.
January 2021
- 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven
- Mozart: The Reign of Love
- Mark Carney Reith Lectures – From Markets to Moral Sentiments
- Weimarization of the American Republic
- Among the Insurrectionists
- Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth?
The Pandemic
A selection of the best discussion and analysis of COVID-19, with some historical context on other pandemics as well.
- Everything by Zeynep Tufekci
- The BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine as code
- Black Death at the Golden Gate
- Do you know how Covid really spreads?
- The Lab-leak hypothesis
- The Lasting Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
- The heterogeneity conundrum
Internet Scale Businesses
Two great discussions making the case that we remain in the early days of the Internet economy.