Internet Reading 2024

1. Palestine

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel is a state where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person. -- Ta Nehisi Coates

More links

• In Australia, Recognition of Palestine is a Farce
• The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth  
• Burnt Offerings: Aaron Bushnell and the age of immolation by Erik Baker 
• Our (Your) Pitiful Ethics!:  A Response to Zadie Smith’s “Shibboleth” by Steve Salaita
• So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide by Steve Salaita
• Some Lessons about Zionism and Anti-Zionism from an Ongoing Genocide
• Why We Protested Nova: Confronting Zionist Propaganda and the Manufacturing of Consent for Genocide
• Israel’s pattern of bombing schools and shelters in Gaza 
• Ta-Nehisi Coates tarnishes his compelling case for reparations owed to Black Americans by holding up German compensation to Israel as a successful model [2016 by Rania Khalek] 
• Ocasio-Cortez is a once-in-a-generation political talent. Now, it’s hard to escape the sense that her partnership with the movement that carried her into office is fading. AOC’s DNC Speech Was a Betrayal of the Gaza Movement 
• IS ANYONE IN POWER RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING? Gaza, AOC, Bernie, and the politics of feigned helplessness. 
• The Arabic word ashlaa’ refers to scattered body parts and dismembered flesh and bones. Ashlaa’ concerns everyone in Gaza now 
• Letter from a jailed Palestine activist
• First, the State of Israel, as it currently exists, is an apartheid state. It’s an inescapable truth. Second, the existence of an apartheid state is, in of itself, bad. If you don’t agree with this, you can just stop reading here, because I’m not talking to you. 
• Day by day, for a year, the Israeli military waged an unrelenting campaign of extermination against Palestinians in Gaza. Day by day, people of conscience tried to stop it. Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again by Noura Erakat. 
• You are being remorselessly gaslit about Israel’s colonisation of Palestine  
• Kill 'social cohesion' with a baseball bat - See you at the protests on Sunday 
• The politics of “social cohesion” by Jeff Sparrow in Overland 
• Australia is dismantling academic freedom in defense of Zionism [Mondoweiss] 
• The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case, sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out. 
• "There are many who pretend that cannons are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses"
• Cornell University Is Quietly Quelling Gaza Dissent on Campus 
• MIT SHUTS DOWN INTERNAL GRANT DATABASE AFTER IT WAS USED TO RESEARCH SCHOOL’S ISRAEL TIES 
• In the US and in Britain, the reach of the pro-Israel lobby ranges from funding political campaigns, to disrupting conferences, to bringing pressure to bear on pro-Palestinian journalists. In Australia, threatened withdrawal of patronage from wealthy benefactors seems to be a key piece of ammunition in the arts. Media commentators aren’t ring-fenced and Universities too are under the gun. 
• Steven W. Thrasher on American Campus Crackdowns on Free Assembly  

I realize it's little solace to think "well if I keep saying stuff out loud things will get better," but I promise you doing so has an effect, and actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked things are. Make sure it's written down. Make sure it's spoken cleanly, and with rage and fire and piss and vinegar. Things will change for the better, even if it takes more time than it should.

2. Development and Economics

What is it like to work in an Ethiopian factory? Hope and disappointment in the future(?) of manufacturing

More links

• The Real Development was the Friends We Made Along the Way - Albert Hirschman's Strategy of Economic Development
• Charter Cities Podcast Episode 49: A Framework for the Elite’s Role in Development with Stefan Dercon 
• Validating a Questionnaire - Sage Research Methods Community 
• Resources for Researchers in the J-PAL Network:  Survey Bank
• Welcome to Reading Mas-Colell! By Sanjay Reddy and Raphaële Chappe 
• Jonathan Dingel's collection of advices to advisees
• Active Statistics by Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtari. This book provides statistics instructors and students with complete classroom material for a course on applied regression and causal inference.  see also Regression and Other Stories 
• The Most Cited 2019 QJE Paper Relied on an Outdated Stata Default to Conclude Regression p-values Are Inadequate
• Advanced Microeconomics for the Critical Mind Youtube playlist
• Causal inference with change scores - Part 8 of the GLM and causal inference series. - By A. Solomon Kurz 
• Harvard. Department recommends promotion of James Duesenberry to associate professor with tenure, 1952 
• The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment) and discussion 
• The EA-Progress Studies War is Here, and It’s a Constructive Dialogue! 

3. Sexuality and Queerness

Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? by Kevin Brazil ‘I feel that every good thing that has happened in my life has come from being queer.’ Sometimes a line just won’t let go. Sometimes a line just sticks.

More from Kevin Brazil's Queer Happiness

• That to be gay is to be defined by suffering is the premise of the baroque symphony of trauma that is Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life (2015) as much as the solo recital of shame that is Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). To be gay is to be suffer among Puerto Rican New York in Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011), among the Vietnamese-Americans of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), among affluent Nigerians in Uzodinma Iweala’s, Speak No Evil (2018) and in Communist Poland in Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark (2020). 
• Why is queer happiness so difficult to write about? One: Tolstoy. ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’; or, all happy stories are the same. Two: Freud. The story of how we suffer sexuality is the story of who we are; or, unhappiness makes us individuals. Divide by the common factor: happiness is the absence of a sense of individuality. A solution: happiness cannot be written about in a first-person autobiographical form?
• Is there any way of writing about happiness, queer or otherwise, that isn’t just obnoxious? Or boring? Is there any way of speaking about happiness that isn’t just a way of saying: ‘I’ve survived, why couldn’t you?’ Is there any way of talking about happiness that doesn’t also ask: ‘Shouldn’t you be trying harder?’
• Maybe it isn’t possible to write about happiness at all. ‘Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches,’ 
• Getting sober from memoir is not getting sober from sadness, depression or pain. It is about stepping away from a certain kind of writing: first-person, retrospective, luxuriating in the display of its wounds. This writing might create a self that has survived, but it might not create a self that has known happiness. Happiness, or queer happiness at least, may be a matter of the form of the stories we tell about ourselves

More links

• Sincerity has become a byword for truth, and therefore beauty, and therefore quality, especially when heightened or even effected by a work’s poeticism, and still more especially when paired with sex, that most sincere of all acts. Gay Sincerity Is Scary 
• In Conversation - Jeremy Atherton Lin & Kevin Brazil 
• JL: Lately I find myself assuming all queer people are mad at one another [online]. Perhaps because we aren’t engaging in spaces where something like the maracas malfunction occurs, sad but also funny. 
• KB: That those maracas were disappointing, though, made me think of the lines that really struck me in Gay Bar: ‘The gay bars of my life have consistently disappointed.’ Mine too! And from the very beginning. And yet I’ve kept going back, for all the reasons you write: ‘If my experiences in gay bars have been disappointing, what I wouldn’t want to lose is the expectation of a better night. Gay is an identity of longing, and there is a wistfulness to beholding it in the form of a building, like how the sight of a theatre stirs the imagination.’ I wonder if the disappointment of gay bars – one I wouldn’t want to lose – is bound up with what you say they offer: the sidelong glance.
• But many men underneath their conventionally attractive tall shells are just that: tall shells. They are empty inside. After sex they will rarely want to meet me again. [Embrace by Kevin Brazil]
• There is an interesting thing that happens when you watch queer theatre, it tends to date itself quickly.  Mike Bartlett's Cock Review1  Review2  Review3 Review4   
• Queer Places: Red Roof, Eastern Point, Gloucester, MA 01930 
• The End Of Gay Rights in the Carribean .. I don't agree with a lot of it.
• The 19thnews set out to examine how the anti-trans agenda are impacting Americans
• Allyship or solidarity? 
• https://sudutkota.qiarchive.org 
• That Which May Not Be Named by Ohene Yaw Ampofo-Anti 

4. Religion and Rationality

• The New Atheists eventually faded from public prominence. The uprisings of our time have had little to do with religious questions. Today Palestinian rights activists fight to stop a war that is killing children by the thousands. The question of whether or not the universe was created by a supreme being has come to seem like a matter for academic seminars, not an urgent issue for public debate. New Atheism had spokespeople who were bombastic and self-righteous, and who made poor instructors in the art of critical thinking. 
• As a visibly Muslim woman, institutions have used me to tout a commitment to diversity while repeatedly demonstrating that they do not care about the concerns and well-being of Muslims — their students, fellows, employees, faculty, clients. 
• New Atheism was never primarily a theological position. Plain old-fashioned atheism is hard to innovate on in that respect. At the heart of New Atheism is a fanatical enthusiasm for reality. And like other fandoms, it guards its interpretations of the object of its obsession jealously.  [Defector]

5. Technology and Science

NASA SLS (Space Launch System) is still a national disgrace

More links

• an instructional game on the cumulative probability of Long COVID.
• The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history 
• We’ve only been aware of lithium for a little over 200 years and yet it’s had a profound impact on the human story. As this simple, lightweight, reactive metal increasingly powers our lives, do we run the risk of despoiling the very planet we’re trying to protect? [Noema Mag]
• Fast Crimes at Lambda School
• If you ask a technologist interested in learning what they dream of achieving, most will answer: “building the Primer,”  from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Exorcising us of the Primer 
• The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining 
• Microwave-powered airplanes: If physics doesn’t forbid it, federal regulators or nervous passengers probably will. 
• Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard by Patrick McKenzie 
• The deep ocean floor is covered in naturally-occurring batteries that make oxygen... Wait, WHAT?! This has HUGE implications for life on icy moons. 
• Undark and the Radium Girls
• We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon 
• The Best Antibiotic for Acne is Non-Prescription 
• I’d been diagnosed with tuberculosis a decade ago. An image that stayed with me during my illness:  A giant testosterone-fuelled, thick-bearded woodsman with a felling axe. He would swing this axe, arching back and propelling forward with all his force to carve a dent in my lung. He did this again and again--his arms moving in a perfect continuous arc  with such precision and relentlessness. Throughout the illness, I almost always had tears in my eyes due to the cough reflex, but some of it was also from the sadness I felt seeing the fierce intent in his eyes. This dude did not want me to live, period. 
• A Critical Review of Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
• I learned about metabolic syndrome (and abdominal obesity, and adipose tissue/visceral fat from here) of note: At least 10 MET-hours per week of cardio leads to visceral fat reduction in those without metabolic-related disorders.
• Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
• THE KEEPER - What compelled a South Auckland dairy farmer to amass New Zealand’s most significant collection of seashells? 
• The Dangers of Mirrored Life [Asimov Mag] 
• Stupid Slow: The Perceived Speed of Computers
• Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021 
• How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab 
• The Story of Titanium
• Groundwater extraction and large dams affect the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the rotation speed. 
• It’s Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope
• There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring
• This is the story of people who repair the world's most important infrastructure, subsea fibre optic cable systems 
• Public Work by Cosmos is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.
• Settling doesn’t always pay off. Humans have never stopped moving. And this movement has allowed small bands of hunter-gatherers to forge large, complex societies across continents   
• An anthropologist takes us on a freediving journey  

6. China, Canada, New Caledonia

Cutting Government Is Easy... If You Go After McKinsey 

More links

• Opinion: Caught up in New Caledonia’s unrest, I saw first-hand the same white privilege that caused it 
• The problems facing Canada or the world—climate change, housing crisis, or anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us. [Walrus Mag]
• Mexico’s Political Revolution
• African Countries Are Failing to Make a Dent in Washington’s Diplomatic Scene  
• Saving China Through Science  
• A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. 
• An excerpt from the book “On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” about climate migration in the U.S. 
• Reimagining Soviet Georgia 
• The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas 
• Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad 
• Bukan Kamisan Terakhir 
• Makna Diangkatnya Mantan-mantan Kader PRD Ke Dalam Rezim Prabowo-Gibran 
• The changing face of Chinatowns across Asia
• Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry
• 63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide - Chinese Cooking Demystified Substack 
• In Nanjing, Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, rapid urbanisation is multiplying a fear of death and belief in ghosts
• A Chinese Internet Phrasebook - Molly Huang [Asterisk Mag]
• 12 Months of Mandarin: Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese spending years and up to around 4000 total hours. I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year. 
• Stressed young people in China are tapping digital wooden fish
• Notes on Guyana - Matt Lakeman
• Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations 
• Dari Denim ke Beton: Pelajaran Pahit Teras Cihampelas 
• Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020  
• Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and the twice-born thrice-selected Indian American elite: They didn't fall out of a coconut tree. 
• Good Writing Centered on Stupid Tech (Personalities)
• During Caroline Ellison's testimony, listening to her discuss making decisions at Alameda was like watching a character in a horror movie make choices that played right into the killer’s hands. Give Ellison an authority figure, and she will try to please them — behaving as obediently as she can, stressing about how she can be better, and basing her happiness on how close she comes to perfection. If this is where being a good girl gets you, I recommend being bad. 
• Uber is a poor replacement for utopia. 
• Elon Musk Today - Like Donald Trump, But For Nerds 
• Paul Graham entered Harvard in 1982. Coincidentally, he saw “political correctness arise” in the 1980s. It is an interesting coincidence that the phenomenon he is studying arises exactly when he becomes an adult, and can see the news with his own eyes rather than relying on the history that he was taught. 
• i was a 20-something dethroned dotcom ceo that went to work the counter at mcdonald's 
• They Are Insecure For A Reason. But what they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure.

7. AI and Stupid Tech

When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

More links

• The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
• Humans: one short and fleeting mortal lifetime x millions of years of tuning. AI: all the text ever written by anyone x some linear algebra tricks nobody really understands.
• Drowning in AI Slop  
• Embracing AI to Ignite Student Engagement?  - Alice Evans
• Crafting AI-Complementary Skills and Bulletproof Assessments - Alice Evans
• In plain English: generative AI isn't making any money for anybody because it doesn't actually make companies that use it any extra money. Efficiency is useful, but it is not company-defining 
• How I Use "AI" by Nicholas Carlini 
• Coding for Data Analysis – teaching in the era of AI 
• Retail sales jobs are disappearing rapidly, only high-paid jobs are growing anymore 

8. Literature, Subcultures, Media

Poem: A Strain of the Earth’s Sweet Being by Seán Hewitt

More links

• Translation is the closest and most active form of reading.  
• Sentence structure for writers: understanding weight and clarity 
• A User’s Guide to Building a Subculture: First, you’re going to need something to care about.
• You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. 
• We Have Arrived: Anton Hur on Han Kang’s Nobel Win  
• The Sadness Scale, As Measured by Stars and Whales 
• Memos - I'm fascinated by interesting memos written for an internal audience - a company, a campaign or even for the President. Raw, not smoothened over for PR departments, they help shed light on how people really think inside institutions
• ‘Often the most appropriate frame is the most invisible frame,’ 
• Poor Things: Adulthood through the eyes of a child

9. Relationships

The essence of love is annoyance. oh man—the challenge of coexisting with another person. Everything gets mixed together. Their thoughts contaminate yours, their feelings contaminate yours. How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

More links

• More Than Friends - on the relationships that are difficult to classify   
• Kids don't want to make polite conversation. Here's what they want to talk about instead 
• Trust isn’t a management technique 
• It’s often completely appropriate for people not to trust each other. Trust comes from common knowledge of shared mental models, and that takes investment from both sides to build. I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective is trust. 
• The People Who Fight at Dinner Parties by Sarah Miller 
• Patrick and I wondered: maybe we can work long hours before kids, save up, and do a mini-retirement while the kids are young. Why spend our children’s most vulnerable years at work and retire at 65?  
• You can’t exist without causing damage. You have to learn to be comfortable with people being upset at you
• commitment is the only secret knowledge. It is not so easy to commit to what you already have, because where is the novelty there? Commitment doesn’t invite in wonder, awe, and inspiration like novelty does. But this is quite a shallow view of commitment: it ignores the fact that new levels of detail come to light the more you focus on something. It’s easy to fear the mundanity that seems to accompany commitment: same city, same partner, same house. It’s easy to think that this is boring, suffocating, bland. But this demonstrates an ignorance to what commitment actually is: a platform to build your life from.

10. Miscellaneous Questions

• How Might We Learn? By Andy Matuschak 
• “What have you been thinking about lately?” The Smalltalk Question 
• Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? These are the three questions to ask when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter). Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Working with someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with. 
• Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor 
• How many hobbies is too many? 
• What would a course on medieval basket weaving actually look like? 
• Why Is Everyone on Steroids Now?
• Who Pays Writers?
• Do you really want to spend your one wild and precious life putting marshmallows in jars? You Don’t Need to ‘Decant’ Your Groceries. 
• Why haven't biologists cured cancer? “We were promised the curing of cancer and all we got are so-and-so improvements in five-year cancer survival rates” would be a fair thing to say about biomedical sciences.   
• Where's the Synthetic Blood? 
• Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
• How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile? 
• How the fuck am I supposed to teach Mark Twain? What can a literary critic and college instructor do to help defeat genocide?  by Steve Salaita
• To Cancel Or Not To Cancel? Some Guidelines 

Internet Links Q4 2023 Q1 2024

1. Recently, an Australian-Palestinian friend was invited to appear on television to discuss the situation in Gaza. His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. [n+1 mag]

And because this week is Eid: How do we celebrate a joyful holiday when our country is responsible for ongoing terrible suffering? by Nathan J. Robinson 

More links

• I can't sleep, by Paul Biggar 
• Theo flew a Palestinian flag. First he was doxed, then came the bomb! 
• Three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do? by Sarah Aziza 
• ‘What use is this court if it can’t stop the war?’ Gazans react to ICJ ruling 
• Inspired by Jewish groups that cast criticism of Israel as antisemitism, Hindu American organizations are advancing a concept of “Hinduphobia” that puts India beyond reproach 
• A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza.  
• An Anti-Palestinian Crackdown Across Europe 
• The First Week   
• The Second Week: Some rest in hallways, others under the rubble. Some have names on their wrists to identify them, others had no such luxury. Some succumb to their wounds, all to Western avarice.
• Letters From Gaza, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 
• I Was Blissfully Planning My Engagement Party. Then the Bombs Started Falling. I live in Gaza, so now I just dream of surviving. 
• ESG Funds are Supposed to Be Socially Conscious Investors. Why are they investing in weapons manufacturers making arms for Israel? 
• You Can’t Be A “Lesser Evil” When You’re Sponsoring A Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone
• A Group of Artists Just Replaced the MTA’s Ads With Pro-Palestine Posters 
• Professor Montag gave a talk at Occidental College arguing that "anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism." For Palestine Uncensored, he recounts the ADL's campaign to get him fired as retaliation. 
• When discomfort is perceived as danger, protest is seen as harassment. Politicians Don’t Feel Unsafe, They Feel Uncomfortable 
• The Iron Dome is global – and so is the resistance 
• To Save Israel, the US is Destroying the International System It Once Constructed
• Why be so focused on Israel anyway while Indonesia occupies West Papua, China, Tibet, and Russia Ukraine? The answer is that universities like MIT are complicit in Israeli apartheid but espouse public commitments to human flourishing. And because of Israel’s unique and historic dependence on American public finance, arms, and diplomacy, students at American universities have leverage over Israel to a degree we simply don’t have for the people of West Papua, Tibet, or Ukraine. 
• Are we indeed all Palestinians? 

2. LGBTQIA+, gender

In the endless craven defenses of colonial domination, queer and feminist solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is met with contempt. Focusing solely on gender and sexuality entertains a dangerous logic that some gendered or sexualized life is more vulnerable, and therefore more precious, than others. 

• Very good banners and placards throughout the article: "You can't pinkwash colonialism," "Queer as in Free Palestine (crow images)"

More links

• My Year of Finance Boys by Daniel Lefferts 
• Class Is Central to Gay Politics -- an interview with Roger Lancaster, author of the new book The Struggle to Be Gay — in Mexico, for Example.
• “Nik, kita masih butuh nggak sih sejarah perempuan?” 
• Suara Kita - Tentang Kami  
• Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism (Conversations with Tyler Ep. 132) 
• COWEN: Should women’s chess, as a segregated activity, continue to exist? 
• SRINIVASAN: I don’t really have a view on that.
• COWEN: Isn’t it odd not to have a view on that?
• SRINIVASAN: No, I don’t think it’s odd to not have a view on something about which there has been a great deal of ink spilled. There are philosophers and theorists of games and sports in general, who spend a lot of time thinking about how we should organize competitions, gaming competitions in particular. I don’t know what it means to be opposed to segregation as such. I think there are interesting questions here. I don’t play chess, and I don’t follow competitive chess, so I don’t really have a view.
• Irony of a faggot policeman by Hiero Badge 
• Acexistential by Lilaeleaf  [OJST]
• How I Went Back To The Closet by Charlie Anders 

3. International

The .io top-level domain funds and legitimises Britain's exile of the Chagossian people from their homeland. Here's the history and the facts. 

More links

• Why Haven’t the Protest Movements of Our Time Succeeded? Vincent Bevins’ new book looks back over recent uprisings of our time and reviews what they accomplished—and what they didn’t. 
• “Made in America” Never Meant More Ethical  
• Did an Alphabet Make Korea More Verbal? 
• In the Central African Republic, researchers found an astronomical death rate. Scaling for population size, this toll would amount to a loss of more than two New York Cities. And yet, the world outside of Africa is barely aware that CAR is a country. 
• Burkina Faso builds schools that stay cool in 40C heat with raised metal roofs to let out the hot air.
• Matt Lakeman's Notes on El Salvador
• Panera wasn’t always known as a corporate purveyor of murderous lemonade. 
• The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire 
• Prabowo promotes cassava on the world stage, but in Borneo his pet project has failed 

4. Science

The Mathematical Phrase that Melts My Brain: What the heck does “three times less than” mean?

 

More links

• The Remains of an Ancient Planet Lie Deep Within Earth 
• Why are some mushrooms magic? 
• What Science Can Learn from Car Mechanics' Five Whys. 
• For a Nature paper, the scientists dug down through the causes of diabetes. First: Why do beta cells inside the pancreas secrete less insulin, leading to diabetes? Diabetic pancreas had smaller blood capillaries, which makes it more difficult for nutrients to reach the beta cells. But why? A capillary shrinks over time. They had to figure out what might have happened before they shrank. The early-stage diabetics had slight changes in genes associated with cilia. But why? They began to look for a “hub gene.” And they found it in RFX6.
• The Cell Is Not a Computer  
• Reinventing the Dinosaur 
• Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever 
• Making Cells Young
• How much should academics engage with the public? 

5. Internet and Tech

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

 

More links

• Manifesto for posting online in 2023 
• Less TikTok, More Screaming - social media therapists & feeling nothing as an epidemic 
• The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams by Andy Baio 
• In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit 
• When I learn to live as a machine—by choice or otherwise—I become increasingly incapable of attending to the world. This might be because I am simply moving through life at a pace that prevents me from properly attending to the world. Maybe it’s because I’ve placed $3500 goggles on my face. 
• What is Easy on a Laptop is Hard on a Touchscreen 
• How the Blog Broke the Web 
• Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster.  
• Excel Never Dies 
• Hot take: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die.
• Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser  
• Generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.

6. Environment and Climate

BREAD-IGC Virtual PhD Course on Environmental Economics: conservation, climate adaptation, renewables, international actions, migration, pollution, inequality, economic impact, sea level rise. 

More links

• Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River
• Why Isn’t Solar Scaling in Africa? by Todd Moss
• Can Seawalls Save Us? 
• What? The Sun isn't always shining?! 
• How Does Throwing Soup Get Us to Climate Policy Changes?
• Riders in the smog
• Carbon casting
• “I can tell you that most people I know who use Gesit [Indonesia’s e-bike brand] no longer use the brand’s original battery.”
• Climate change is making herding routes in the Sahel increasingly volatile.  Workers in the Garbal call center are able to review data to help herders.

7. Economics and Development

World Inequality Database

More links

• Economic Growth - Donation suggestions and ideas 
• Do poor countries need a new development strategy? Bangladesh and Southeast Asia are defying the economists who say industrialization is dead. 
• BOOK: Causal Inference for The Brave and True
• Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation? Co-location produces knowledge spillovers, but people may lapse into groupthink. A mismatch be­tween the needs and interests of twenty-somethings in the Bay Area and non-college-educated workers elsewhere may also be causing too much “inappropriate” technology. Papers and patents are becoming more deferential to previous work. 
• World Bank Enterprise Surveys data for Indonesia    
• Lant Pritchett on Economic Growth, Charter Cities 
• 10 years of Earning to Give 
• How Long Do Policy Changes Matter? (Much) Longer than EAs Have Assumed 
• Academic research and policy research are two different things 
• When economists ignore history - A new paper on apartheid fails to impress 
• VoxDev as an educational resource: list of articles using specific approaches (natural experiments, diff in diff, RD, IV, RCT, calibrated models, heterogeneity.)   
• A Curated List of WB Development Impact Blog Postings on Technical Topics 
• https://about.peterhull.net/metrix 
• Julian Reif's Stata coding guide
• https://causalml-book.org

8. Interpersonal

David Sedaris: Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left.  

More links

• We Need More Of Weak Social Ties 
• Kinda nice by Damola Morenikeji 
• The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma 
• Beware Ideologies That Tell You You’re Better Than Everyone Else: On the ugly fascist nonsense of Costin Alamariu, the ‘Bronze Age Pervert,’ and why objectively horrible ideologies somehow find adherents 
• My Mom's Rules For Cults
• What I’ve learned in the past several months is that political organizing is deathwork.
• Now, after so many fuckups and failures, I’ve figured out what a lot of wiser people than me understood long ago: that building a life that contains just some of the basic components, let alone all of them, is incredibly hard, and that many—most!—people never manage to.  
• I have this pet theory that I’ve shopped around a fair bit, that it’s much harder for financially comfortable people to make deep friendships.
• The main fear of lending money to friends is that in case they can’t repay you would lose both the money and the friendship. 

9. The Convivial Society, The Overland Journal, Henrik Karlsson

I noticed with pleasure and considered with profit that I could do nothing but wait on the light and attend to its arrival. I could not rush the day or command it. All I could do was receive it. And, better yet, receive it with humility and gratitude. Learning to Receive the Day 

• Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It 
• Freehold by Elias Greig 
• The whale ghosts by Elias Greig 
• Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. Stein answered no, I just like Alice. Looking for Alice, Part 1, Part 3 

10. Miscellaneous 

Burial spaces at Forest Hill range from $3,950 for a grave with a flat marker—perhaps, perversely, the most affordable route to land ownership in Boston’s exorbitantly priced and low-inventory real estate market—up to $60,000 for above-ground internment in the exclusive Dearborn Pavilion. 

 

More links

• Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand. 
• Do children today have useful childhoods? School Is Not Enough 
• That the ghost killed the girl in the horror movie’s spooky opening is not surprising—what kind of girl it was, that’s the amazing part. 
• The backstory of that viral article on listening to Taylor Swift in prison 
• Jack London - How I Became A Socialist (1905)  
• In the name of the moon, I’ll destroy capitalism!  
• How Gojek keeps its gig riders close — and away from unions
• GEN Z BEOWULF by JOHN-CLARK LEVIN 
• The Political Economy of Dune 
• https://hammerandhope.org
• Learn to love the moat of low status: How to be More Agentic
• Dreaming Awake by NK Jemisin (2012) 
• As strange as it may sound, earning financial freedom is a lot easier for certain people than claiming that freedom once they have earned it. “I think I’m close to having enough money to jump into early retirement, but not quite." Why You’ll Probably Never Run Out Of Money 
• How can we, as people who apply to jobs, schools, contests, funding, publishing houses, and so on, protect our own ambition? How can we soften the blow of rejection? One sensible strategy is to direct most of your efforts to things that don’t require other people’s approval. It’s better to spread out the psychological cost over many small attempts. But I don’t love it: it amounts to numbing ourselves, and that numbness can weaken the boost to ambition when we finally get a “yes.” 
 

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

"My story from birth?" Odette Nyiramilimo said.
"Do you really have time for that?"
I said I had time. (p63)

Odette was talking to Philip Gourevitch, an American journalist who was traveling around the world doing different stories. This book is what comes out of his travels to Rwanda over the course of three years. At almost 400 pages long, it is laden with harrowing accounts of the 1994 genocide. I knew I would need time to digest this book. I had time.

Gourevitch opened the book with his visit to Nyarubuye, asking himself why he would want to do that. I realized he was preempting my question; I was asking myself whether my decision to read this book meant that I was objectifying the genocide victims for my voyeurism.

"I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. 

I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed what had happened in Rwanda.

I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps you hope for some understanding—a moral, or a lesson. But when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy." (p15-16, 19, abridged.)

Drivers and Powers

But what drove Rwanda to genocide? Scholars tend to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot be properly called distinct ethnic groups. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, intermingled (p47).

Still, there was an old difference between the two groups: Hutus farm and Tutsis herd cattle. Cattle are more valuable, so Tutsi became synonymous with the elite class. When a Tutsi chief (Rwabugiri) ruled precolonial Rwanda in the 19th century, this stratification accelerated. Hutus began to be defined by whatever Tutsis were not, even if no one can really tell the two apart.

Then came the Europeans. This being the heyday of eugenics, "scientists" were too ready to propound baseless hypothesis that exaggerate minutiae physical differences as a divine ordinance towards class structures. One of them was John Speke, who propounded the biblical myth that the Tutsis descended from Ham-son-of-Noah who came from Abyssinia/Ethiopia, and this made them "the superior race" to the native Negroid.

When Germany set up its administrative posts in Rwanda after the death of Rwabugiri, the feuding Tutsi elites used their support to pursue their interests and further subjugates the Hutus. Then when Belgium won Rwanda as a spoil of World War I from the German, the Belgians made the Hutu-Tutsi polarization the basis of their colonial rule. The Hamitic myth served them well. In 1934 the Belgians issued identity cards that label Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) or Tutsi (14%). This allowed them to administer an apartheid state that shuts out Hutus' opportunities for advancement.

When Rwanda gained independence, the overthrow of colonialism also brought down the Tutsis. The Hutu intellectuals "argued for democracy not by rejecting the myth but by embracing it. If Tutsis were foreign invaders, then Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority." (p58) This led to a bloody revolution in 1959, which was a precursor to the 1994 genocide.

In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The "authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire of strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essen­tially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. (p 128)

Link to the book on Goodreads: here. This note was originally written in 2018.

Internet Reading Q2-Q3 2023

1. Environment, Nature, and Human Biology 

Look, I get it. Aspartame is a weird synthetic molecule that’s 200 times sweeter than sucrose. It’s normal to have a prior that aspartame might be bad for you. The thing is, the alternative to aspartame often isn’t no aspartame but rather sugar or corn syrup or even perhaps even alcohol.

More links

• How Robins Got Their Name  
• Telomeres: everything you always wanted to know  
• Overview - experimental fat loss substack 
• Strictly speaking CICO is a tautology 
• and: Running a series of experiments to arrive at a "magical" fat loss diet 
• Can we burn metal for heat, instead of fossil fuels?  
• The world's infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists  
• ‘Climate Optimism’ Is Dangerous and Irrational  
• How Many Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered?  
• How T-shirts donated to charity are causing pollution in Ghana  
• When Nate Johnson — a former Grist journalist — felt his passion for writing start to wane, he found a new direction. Now, instead of writing about the need to electrify everything, Nate is doing that work himself.    
• The wild boars of Bavaria are too dangerous to eat. They are radioactive.  
• The world’s largest and smelliest flower teeters on extinction.  
• Fiberglass revolutionized boating, but decades later, discarded and degraded vessels are adding to marine pollution [Hakai Magazine]  
• Bishop Tutai Pere said in a speech at the seabed exploration license award ceremony that it would be a sin to leave the nodules on the seabed.  
• Make carbon-free electricity cheaper, by any means necessary. When it comes to industrial heat, which is so complicated — where CCS may be the best short-term expedient — it still remains true that falling clean power costs make everything easier in the long term.  
• Fungi are weird. One of the more interesting theories about fungi are that they ended the carboniferous period.  
• Fossil Fuel Power Plants Kill 35x More Birds Than Wind Turbines - One of the most effective ways to protect birds is to transition away from fossil fuels  

2. Tech and the Internet

Meta in Myanmar (full series): Erin Kissane did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. These are what emerged from that work.  

More links

• iSIM vs eSIM vs SIM: The constantly shrinking ways carriers ID your phone  
• The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small (the way Instagram promotes reels, and reposted tweets and TikToks.)  
• Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible? By Ted Chiang  
• Can ActivityPub save the internet?  
• Our communities are defined by the worst things that we permit to happen. What we allow tells the world who we are. Eight Myths about Online Abuse by Anil Dash  
• We need to stop normalising credulity when people with power and money and fancy titles say extraordinary things. When I went to Hinton’s Q&A, he spoke with ease and expertise about neural nets, but admitted he knows little about politics or regulation or people beyond computer labs. These last points garnered several laughs from the audience, but they weren’t really funny.  
• Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand  
• Everything Must Be Paid for Twice. The first price is usually paid in dollars. The second price is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits.  
• Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t by Erin Kissane  
• The affordance loop by Erin Kissane  
• What would the internet of people look like now? by Elizabeth Lopatto  
• Goodnight Phone  
• Neeva: The little search engine that couldn’t  
• Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.  
• These days, I don’t travel much to sacred wells in distant places. Instead, I spend a lot of time online. Too much time. It’s a place profoundly unquiet, a pummeling noise and a rush of information that leaves me feeling both hyped up and melancholy. I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to, but it’s a place that is hard to stop visiting.  
• When the pandemic erupted, the world shifted to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service, although that probably wasn’t necessary as they were generally able to cope with the surge caused by teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix). That’s because most of their networks were overprovisioned, with more capacity than they usually need. But is overprovisioning the only way to ensure resilience? -- Why the Internet needs the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Building on the principles of peer-to-peer networking and content-based addressing, IPFS allows for a decentralized and distributed network for data storage and delivery. 
• Exploring the Decentralized Web - DWeb webinar  
• Behind the painstaking process of creating Chinese computer fonts  
• What Has the Internet Done to Media? by Aleks Jakulin  
• The End of the Googleverse
• Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed by Ploum  

3. Poems and Short Stories

• The Night Migrations - Louise Glück  
• Carl Phillips: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/about
• What I see is the light falling all around us by Carl Phillips. Also at NYT  

To have understood some small piece of the world
more deeply doesn't have to mean we're not as lost
as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees
stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here
and there stirring differently somehow, more like
resisting stillness...Should it come to winnowing
my addictions, I'd hold on hardest, I'm pretty sure,
to mystery

• Among the Trees by Carl Phillips  

WHAT HAPPENED BACK there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over. And the end feels—to you, at least—both like the end of a long pilgrimage and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage: don’t both depend on stamina and faith, in the right proportions? Wasn’t the point, at the end, persuasion?

• If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You  
• Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer 

4. Sexuality, LGBTQIA+

Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella 

More links

• In 2023, it seems that the Muslim boogeyman in the America of my adolescence and young adulthood has been replaced with the queer/trans boogeyman 
• Trans Subtext Can Be Powerful. Trans Characters Are Even Better by Charlie Jane Anders 
• Heartstopper's Alice Oseman on asexuality, young fame and surviving social media 
• The Ultimate Reading List for Bisexual Awareness Week 2023 by Zachary Zane 
• Interview with Dr. Pallotta-Chiarolli about Women in Relationships with Bisexual Men 
• 9 Men Share What Helped Them Come Out as Bisexual
• I Had a Complete Stranger Pick Me up From the Airport. To Thank Him, I Fucked His Brains Out. 
• How to Support Bisexual Youth - The Trevor Project  
• hankschannel Apr 19, 2013 
• Black writers on bisexuality and fluid sexuality 
• Geraldo outed me on national television by Jim Berg 
• Pride is the rare holiday where how you’re supposed to feel about it is right there in the name. This time of year, we are supposed to be proud: proud of our LGBTQ+ identities, proud of our history of protest and progress, proud of our diverse and paradigm-shifting contributions to culture and the arts. But this year, I’m having trouble getting into the spirit of the season. Not Quite Pride 
• Bisexual Married Men Oral History Project
• Queer Books Database - bisexual 
• Hinge Not-so_FAQ: Queer dating advice

5. International

Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes. Because they knew it was important. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers. They had perspective. They had wisdom. 

More links

• Notes on The Gambia  
• In a salon, I chatted about life in Riyadh with a hairdresser in her early 30s for three hours. She told me, “It’s our New York.” 
• In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer.   
• Subway Miracle: New York 
• Memory and Migration, Guatemala and the US 
• Visiting Nikkō 
• A 2,800-mile Greyhound bus ride from Detroit to LA by Joanna Pocock 
• Clive Thompson cycled 4,150 miles from Brooklyn to Oregon for his book on 'micromobility' 
• David Rumsey maps collection 
• Bangladesh 2022 Census GIS Data 
• Where is home? 
• 40 years after Jerry Rawlings, Ghana is considered the “success story” of Africa. Is it really? In some regards – stability, political order, even economically to a small degree – yes, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a success story by non-West African standards. 
• List of war crimes and crimes qualifying as genocide committed by Israel in Gaza since 7th October 2023 by Yanis Varouvakis 
• From university disciplinary hearings to death threats, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a wave of reprisals by Alex Kane [Jewish Currents] 
• Have We Learned Nothing? In the current discursive climate, it seems mandatory to dwell on these horrors before I say anything else, to establish that I’m a decent human being who neither endorses nor averts my eyes from Hamas’s depravities.. Regardless, now I could pivot to talking about how two million Palestinian civilians are trapped in Gaza. 
• The dread Israelis are feeling after today's assault, myself included, has been the daily experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. 
• No to Collective Punishment Against Gaza 
• Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. 
• Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Election Could Be the Last Battle of the Titans 
• When I was 21 years old, I found myself working at one of America’s most notorious jails. I was interning for McKinsey by Garrison 
• We Can End Poverty Now. Do We Want To? 
• Homeless in the City Where He Was Once Mayor 
• The Drug-Fueled Protest in Dianne Feinstein’s Office You Haven’t Heard About 
• Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison 

6. Economics and causal inference

More links

• Literature on Recent Advances in Applied Micro Methods by Christine Cai  
• Claudia Goldin: Nobel by Alice Evans; by A Fine Theorem  
• Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier of AI and Work by Ethan Mollick 
• Declare Design by Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock, Macartan Humphreys 
• https://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il 
• Jobeffekter.dk is a knowledge bank gathering and disseminating relevant research results on the labour market 
• Multiply by 37: A Surprisingly Accurate Rule of Thumb for Converting Effect Sizes from Standard Deviations to Percentile Points 
• https://github.com/Mixtape-Sessions/Shift-Share
• Causal inference without graphs - Judea Pearl
• A User’s Guide to Statistical Inference and Regression by Matthew Blackwell. This is a set of notes for Quantitative Social Science Methods II at Harvard--intended for 1st year PhD in poli sci.
• Poor countries aren't catching up as fast as we'd like, but they're catching up faster than before.
• Decolonising Economics syllabus at KCL 

7. Writing

Get your work recognized: write a brag document 

More links

• If you, a writer, report to a talker, but you insist on communicating primarily through documents, you are—and I say this with affection, because lo, I have been there—fucked. 
• A writing culture is a reading culture and a feedback-giving culture, which requires time to think, process, and respond. Writing isn't the end goal: thinking and improving is the goal. 
• Some tactics for writing in public 
• How does one write from one’s own intimate experience while respecting (or protecting) others who share that experience, and who necessarily figure in any account of it? 
• An Essay about Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really about My Own Shit by Lucas Mann 
• How to give advice on the internet without being an utter menace 
• How to Officiate a Wedding
• Artists And Craftsmen In Science Writing by Ashutosh Jogalekar 

8. Miscellanea I

• Ever since I left that remote Prairie home and chose the city, I have had the sense that my “real life,” the place where I belong and where there is no loneliness, is somewhere else out there in the world, although I can’t name or find it. I’m eighty now and I live alone. 
• “Loneliness is made as well as given, and at a very early age. Deprive us of the attention of a loving, reliable parent, and, if nothing happens to make up for that lack, we’ll tend toward loneliness for the rest of our lives." 
• I have heard old people say, in a puzzled, sad way, something like, “I have outlived my life.” I suddenly remembered a teaching from many years ago, when I was wandering alone on the prairie one day, immensely sad, full of self-pity, and trying to understand where my dismal feelings came from. There really was no one thing that I could pinpoint: I was sad because I was alive and did not have every single thing I had ever wanted, did not even know all the things I wanted, and I believe now that it was the latter that made me saddest. I was alive and I was a human being and wanting is the condition of the human. 
• “I feel anxious,” I recite dutifully at the start of each anger management class session, wondering whether “anxious” truly encapsulates the heady mix of shame, hope, dread, and fear that taking such a course produces in me. Shame because enrolling in an anger management course isn’t a high point in anyone’s life, and hope because I thought, in retrospect naively, that taking such a step really could be the beginning of something life-changing.  
• Here’s what anger management classes get wrong about the world: The course focuses on taming a ubiquitous emotion. But what about addressing its root causes?
• There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly. 
• Mistakes Will Be Made by Heather Havrilesky 
• An idea [to reduce loneliness] is to encourage synchrony. Lonely people struggle to synchronize with others, and that this discordance causes the regions of their brain responsible for observing actions to go into overdrive. This synchrony between individuals can be as simple as reciprocating a smile or mirroring body language during conversation, or as elaborate as singing in a choir or being part of a rowing team. 

9. Miscellanea II

Kieran Egan says that there are three potential jobs we can give to schools: Socialization, Academics, Development. Alone, each of these jobs is terrible; together, they’re worse. And what we’ve done is given schools all three jobs. 

More links

• The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American. 
• Sirik ke Atas, Jijik ke Bawah: Sudah Saatnya Kita Merubuhkan Mitos Meritokrasi oleh Ann Putri 
• Once you’ve made your challenge smaller, you can apply a couple of Lazy Genius principles to that problem, and for something like taking care of yourself as the world opens up, I think there are two heavy hitters to use. The first is Decide Once. Another principle you can apply is to go in the right order. For general life things, there is a right order that can help almost any situation. That is 1) name what matters, 2) calm the crazy, and 3) trust yourself with what comes next.  
• The global CTX mosaic is a 5.7 trillion pixel image of the surface of Mars, rendered at 5.0 m/px. 
• Good News! Our Steel is No Longer Radioactive! 
• https://buynothingproject.org/find-a-group/ 
• The 'Barbie' Movie Is Ending Relationships Left And Right 
• Standards: a ratchet of progress 
• An explanation of why most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real  
• Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler 
• “Kansas man upset he can’t buy mini Toyotas ‘like the Taliban and ISIS.’” How did we get here?? 
• Energy makes time by Mandy Brown 
• You are a morale-driven machine by Alexey Guzey 
• Why (High) Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder 
• ‘At first I tried to be polite, not to hurt his feelings’: how a regular ‘liker’ on social media became my stalker  
• Perjuangan Pak Thé mengarungi masa sulit Observatorium Bosscha 
• Free vintage images from the Public Domain 
• Jared Diamond: A reply to his critics by Davis Kedrosky   
• Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! 
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Devereaux  
• Dumb Cuneiform: You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet. 
• It is likely that the number of followers of the Ea-nāṣir subreddit (31,000+) is higher than the combined enrollment of every university class on ancient Sumeria... ever. 
• Consisting of 25 million pages, the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) offer a unique view on the 18th-19th centuries. The Globalise project. 
• It is very easy to be unkind, you just look away one time and do it again. And again, until the necktie of guilt loosens, until it becomes second nature. 
• There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps. 
• The reductive seduction of other people’s problems. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems.
• The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge: Why is this bridge here? 
• The Crane Wife By CJ Hauser 
• Philanthropy’s equivalent of “All Lives Matter”