Internet Reading Q3-4 2022 - Q1 2023

Three quarters' worth of internet readings! Obviously this is going to be a massive pile of links. Let's get started:

1. LGBTQIA+

• Nate - by ND Stevenson  
• Adam found a thread for gay Muslims who want to repent. He joined the Facebook group and thanked the person who had posted the information. The person did not wait to shoot him a message. “I saw your post, and I wonder if it’s okay for us to be friends? To remind each other about leaving this sinful path?” 
• Why Some Queer Men Lead Hypersexual Double Lives Online 
• German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus -- This was a roller-coaster read. See also here.  
• With the benefit of hindsight, I realize how easy it is to build up an unsubstantiated idea that being honest about who one is could result in quite horrible reactions. 
• I Came Out Late in Life. And That’s Okay: On mourning the versions of ourselves that will never exist by Benjamin Alison Wilgus. 
• Actor Ronen Rubinstein Comes Out as Bisexual, Inspired by His Work on Fox Series. 
• His relationship with Kennedy hasn’t changed since coming out as bi. “She’s actually one of the first people that sort of respectfully called me out on it,” Rubinstein says of Kennedy. “She’s like, ‘Is there something we need to talk about?’ And I said, ‘Maybe.’ I didn’t know how that conversation would go. And it went probably as good as it can go.”
• Stephanie Beatriz Is Bi and Proud as Hell: I’m bi, and I'm getting married this fall. I’m choosing to get married because this particular person brings out the best in me. This person happens to be a man. I’m still bi. 
• To be bi is a continual series of coming-out moments. When does it end? When do you get to stop telling people you're bi? When do people start to grasp that this is your truth? When do you get to slide easily through life with everyone assuming your sexuality correctly? When do you start seeing yourself reflected positively in all (hey, even any?) of the media you consume?
• A lot of stuff rolls around in your head: If I pass as straight, why should I have that possibly uncomfortable and maybe dangerous “I’m bi” talk with my family, friends, community? If I’m in a same-sex relationship, shouldn't I “stay gay” and not upset the status quo? How much detail should I give people about myself and my sexuality?
• I'm the mom of a trans kid in Texas. Stop asking me why we don't move to a 'safer' state.
• Want, Will, Won't: a map to your most sexual desires 
• Freya Marske: I want my books to heal the central wound of EM Forster's Maurice, by allowing people existing within Maurice's time to find a queer community. So I gave my characters self-acceptance and then put them on a path to being surrounded by people like themselves: a family formed by danger and adventure, but most of all by liking and by love. I'm writing for the times when we want to stretch our own hand back into the past and say: I'm sorry you were alone. Here's a dream for you. 
• As a gay man, I am politely asking the r/fantasy community to consider additional alternative suggestions when asked for recommendations besides "go read Sanderson." 
• Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? 
• Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone. 
• Locations from Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots 
• Trans Stories Are So Much More Than Transition, Transphobia and Tragedy by Charlie Jane Anders  

2. Technology and software

• How Did We Get So Obsessed with Streaks?
• A Bear on Mars? 
• Why Not Mars 
• Agile and the Long Crisis of Software by Miriam Posner 
• The Petty Pleasures of Watching Crypto Profiteers Flounder 
• Beware the FOMO Bullies of Technology. Are we living through a replay of the ’90s, when most people just didn’t get “this internet thing”?
• Argentina’s black market for cash is embracing crypto — but it's not what crypto proponents expected   
• Is it ethical to train an AI on a huge corpus of copyrighted creative work, without permission or attribution? 
• Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards by Étienne Fortier-Dubois 
• Spatial technologies of the future: cellular cartography by Zack Chiang 
• Sequencing is the new microscope 
• The appearance/face of the content creator is very predictive of their subscriber count in TikTok. 
• How Palantir will steal the NHS 
• Inside the Twitter meltdown
• I was fired from Shopify after the big layoff. I felt disposable and overworked 
• Credit cards as a legacy system  
• The Enigma of Peter Thiel: There Is No Enigma — He's a Fascist 
• Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality 
• The Case for Less Centralized Atoms by Austin Vernon
• Why are there so many tech layoffs? Social contagion 
• Trolling as a Service: A cyber-bullying campaign in Indonesia will set you back 20K IDR (~US$1.33) on Instagram, 15K IDR (US$1) on Ask.fm, or 10K IDR (US$0.67) on Twitter / Facebook. 
• How did Ajinomoto start making materials for computers? 
• Alexander Graham Bell, 10th March 1876: Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you 
• Wikipedia has a climatetech problem: on climate topics its entries can be outdated or incomplete -- and that’s where you come in. 
• Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chiang 
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram
• Five Days in Class with ChatGPT 
• Why do so many modern cars look the same?  The age of average 
• Instead of “software eats biotech”, the reality of drug discovery today is that biology consumes everything.  

3. Environment, Biology, Science

• The Mystery of the Healthy Coral Reef: A reef off the coast of Honduras should be a disaster. Instead it’s thriving. 
• In 2020, recyclers collected 27.1% of the PET bottles and 28.8% of HDPE bottles used in the US.  In Norway, 97% of all plastic drinks bottles are recycled. 
• Chevron is accused of polluting the Amazon for 26 years. The only people who’ve paid the price are a human rights lawyer and those whose land was poisoned 
• Carbon Offsets Alone Won’t Make Flying Climate-Friendly 
• How does the demand for AC due to extreme heat open up profit-making opportunities in Pakistan? 
• The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist: One big storm could wipe Cape Coral off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing city in the US. 
• Why did we wait so long for wind power? 
• I come bringing good news about hydrogen 
• Florida will try to kill you. This is the Florida Rule, and it governs one of the most capricious landscapes on earth. 
• Yes, Bears Were Everywhere in New England This Year
• The 1 Percent Are Many Times Worse Than the Rainforest Wreckers
• Almost half of what we move around the seas is not finished products (cars) nor even the raw materials to make them (steel), but simply the stuff that we burn to power those transformations, and to keep ourselves warmed, cooled, and lit. Which is great news. Because it means that if and when we make the transition to solar power and windpower, we will not just stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and not just save money—we will also reduce the number of ships sailing back and forth by almost half. So if you’re worried about almost anything at all that’s going wrong on the high seas—piracy, say, or the hideous sonic effects of all those ships on whales—then you can cut that in half as well. 
• The Precarious Future of Sanibel Island 
• Electric vehicle batteries would have cost as much as a million dollars in the 1990s. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by more than 98%. 
• What Feathers Know by Stephen Rutt 
• Why is progress in biology so slow? 
• More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets are worthless
• The Story of Palm Oil Is a Story About Capitalism
• Despite their soaring rhetoric about getting to “net-zero,” oil and gas companies will be in the oil and gas business for as long as they can make money in it, whatever the climate costs. No one should have expected the biggest losers of the energy transition to drive it forward. At least now they’re being honest about that.
• How Indonesia Is Censoring Wildlife Research
• The Asteroid and the Fern: A paleoecologist on what the past can teach us about climate change 
• Mark Deeble
• What drew me to the ‘756’ paragraph was the ‘big picture’ it depicted – East Africa at its wildest and finest. Haunted by a photograph 
• Elephants – why bother? 
• The story of a tusk – 28KG / VOI RIVER / 30/5/14
• If unification is the wrong question, what is the right one?
• The oldest falling cat explanation 
• Catching lightning in a volcanic bottle
• Man of Culture  

4. International

• Suketu Mehta: ‘As goes India, so goes democracy’ 
• China-Taiwan: a serious chance of World War III in the next decade by Chris Blattman 
• Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century 
• Imaduddin Ahmed: The troubled future of World Bank-funded hydropower in Zambia 
• Journey to the Doomsday Glacier By David W. Brown 
• Kamil on Nukes and Civil War in Russia 
• China’s Silicon Future by Karson Elmgren 
• Documenting Covid Kyoto
• How to walk around London 
• Beginning Hindi With A Beginner’s Mind 
• The topologist’s world map
• Why is Java So Weird?! 
• The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history: It never existed 
• Ken Opalo
• On why I remain bullish on Nigeria  
• Natural resources and economic (under)development in Africa 
• Three Billion Africans: How demographics will shape African states' economic and political futures 
• Is Somalia turning the corner? 
• Many West African countries have disparities between their northern and southern regions, coastal and hinterland: The Malformation of West Africa 
• Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price. 
• The Morioka Experience: I went to Morioka and all I got was this life-affirming metaphysical hug by Craig Mod
• Across the world, doctors may have no idea if they are prescribing poor-quality asparaginase: how a useless, dangerous childhood cancer treatment flooded the world
• Cultural Dimensions Test: This test will give you your scores on all six cultural dimensions and match you with the country that has the culture most similar to your answers. 
• Pronouncing Chinese Names Guide 
• Sakita : Ibukota Kerajaan Bungku yang Dilupakan https://kamputo.com/sakita-ibukota-kerajaan-bungku-yang-dilupakan/ 

5. Development and econ

• Stefan Dercon on development bargains 
• Development work versus charity work - Lant Pritchett
• Causal Inference for The Brave and True 
• Many methods of causal inference try to identify a "safe" subset of variation 
• OCW MIT courses: Challenge of World Poverty (2011) Foundations of Development Policy (2009) Political Economy and Economic Development (2012)
• Four reasons why GDP is a useful number 
• Materials for a course in economic growth based loosely on Jones and Vollrath’s “Introduction to Economic Growth” 
• A researcher posts a scatterplot. Twitter users descend, saying things like: “lol, lmao”. Pseudocritics, and how not to be one 
• The Table 2 Fallacy: causal interpretation of multiple regression 
• Africa needs more fertilizer to boost their yields, even if that conflicts with climate goals. 
• Eight billion and counting
• Marc Bellemare's DEI statement 
• Hierarchies in the economics profession: how did we get there? 
• Advice on writing research articles by Andrew Gelman 
• The Disconnect Between Economists and Popular Personal Finance Gurus 
• Goodbye academia, hello Substack 
• When the Apple iPhone launched in 2007, Nokia’s handset market collapsed, exports fell by half, Finland’s current account swung into deficit, and a decade plus of economic stagnation began. 
• 4 different meanings of p-value: Definition 1. p-value(y) = Pr(TestStat[y_replication] >= TestStat[y] | Hypothesis)
• As a Ph.D. student, it is hard to come by reliable information about how to go about being a scholar. By sheer luck, I stumbled upon this book by Michael S. Weisbach: The Economist's Craft 
• How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century: Lessons from Sir Francis Galton, psychology's original bad dude 
• “I believe that science is more akin to a hunter-gatherer society than it is to an industry.” – Marc Kirschner. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The problem occurs when we take this analogy to mean that each small unit of hunter gatherers must defend its turf at all costs, as if the acquisition of scientific knowledge is akin to the hording of food. 
• Andrea Bazzoli's job market materials 
• I think one reason brain drain gets so much attention is the two words rhyme, which is not a good reason for an argument to have credibility. (Lant Pritchett) 
• Generating meaningful insights when your RCT design is upended 
• Teacher Professional Development: Where and What Are We Learning? (CGD blog)
• NBER's Program Report: Political Economy 

6. Effective altruism

• Michael Nielsen's notes on EA 
• Highlights: EA as a source of moral invention; EA judo--strong critique of any particular "most good" strategy improves EA, it doesn't discredit it; miscellanea (penumbral activity, EA is a cult, longtermism)
• EA has an embarrassment of riches. It could easily be squandered in the sense that its realized impact falls far far short of what is possible. 
• How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force 
• Where is the Social Justice in EA? 
• Effective Altruism should emulate Quakerism 
• Effective altruism, air pollution in Delhi, Supreme Court of India, and trade off between legibility and complexity in evaluating philanthropic efforts. 
• Kelsey Piper's 227-tweet hottakes thread on EA
• (6) Effective altruists are doing way more shit that is not getting lifesaving medical care to people, but the movement is growing faster than it's expanding focus, so every year of growth so far has also been growth in lifesaving medical care provided to people.
• (43) Another critique: that effective altruism wants to create a bunch of people who are all identical instead of distinct and individual. (44) One person I heard this from felt, herself, pressured to be more like other people, to pick the Impactful career without regard for her strengths. THIS IS VERY BAD DON'T DO IT. (45) Impact can be an input into career choice, but dear god, your strengths should be a PRIMARY input into career choice! Do the things you're good at! Do the things you have the potential to be exceptionally good at!
• (211) Aaaaand we're back with a very important take, which is that "existential risk is so bad that even a very tiny chance of it is worth taking huge measures" is a terrible explanation of how to make decisions, you should never make decisions like that.

7. US Society

• A man in a truck ran down two peaceful protesters at the pro-abortion rally in Cedar Rapids. Since the incident, I’ve had people tell me we should have been more polite and better behaved. Was I sure, they ask, that the people injured didn’t somehow incite it? As if anyone deserves to be hit by a car. As if anyone can be good enough to protect them from the violence of our country. I witnessed a man try to kill people and in response, people told me I should be nicer. 
• I Caught Two Men Stealing From My Home in Eugene, Oregon  
• Run. Hide. Fight. by Arjun Byju 
• How Your Stanford Classmate Became a Con Artist 
• The Humiliating History of the TSA 
• Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam 
• Letters Helped Brittney Griner Survive. Here’s One for Her Future. 
• Topologist's Map of the United States 
• Thanksgiving thoughts: On Americas homelessness and loneliness 
• If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all 
• Movemap
• In the 1960s, my father Ray was involved in the Klan. I can't remember precisely how I came to suspect this about him, but I know it goes back to my childhood. 
• If a reporter can't recognize propaganda and call it out when he sees it, then what's even the point? 
• The Quest for the Perfect Coke Dealer
• Why the Right Can’t Beat ESG by Julius Krein 
• Gwoss Dispways of Power: Four years ago I jotted down some thoughts concerning moral puritanism’s hold on our relationship to art, interrogating the desire to punish others for their artistic preferences. For watching the wrong shows, for writing the wrong kind of fanfiction, for enjoying the wrong kind of pornography. But what happens when those same people find themselves up against real, tangible moral wrongdoing?  Mardoll, 40, a self-published YA author, spent the better part of two decades debating the minutiae of queer micro-identities and raising loud moral concerns over everything from cutesy dating sim Boyfriend Dungeon to Isabel Fall’s story ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’. It came to light that Mardoll was in fact a longtime engineer at arms manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, a position secured for him fifteen years ago by family members already installed at the corporation. Mardoll offered a half-apology, stating that his disabilities made finding any other employment with equivalent health insurance impossible, a claim somewhat undercut by his ownership and recent sale of a house valued at just over four hundred thousand dollars.

8. Community, connections, conversations

• Before Robbie got sick, if you had asked me if community mattered, I would have said yes. But I wouldn’t have thought about it much. Nor would I have spent much time working out what it meant. 
• Making Normal Conversations Better by Sasha Chapin 
• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni 
• Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. The billionaires rolled their eyes 
• HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT THE BACK OF YOUR KNEE LOOKS LIKE? 
• Be Like Pete. He has made an interesting habit of going on Fox News and willingly submitting himself to what his interlocutors clearly anticipate to be difficult “gotcha” questions that will leave their liberal target squirming on camera. Secretary Buttigieg seems to always come out the clear winner and I think there is something to be learned from it. Be nice, until it’s time to not be nice.
• How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair? 
• Your next step is to ask very simple questions about what you can do. Some suggestions: Do you want me to talk to you? Do you want me to stay close to you right now? Do you need space? Do you want to hold my hand? https://www.thecut.com/2023/04/panic-attack-how-to-help.html
• “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell 
• Sociopathy as a Lifestyle Brand by Nathan J. Robinson 

9. Trauma and Relationship

• Trees don’t rush to heal from trauma and neither should we 
• I choose Elena: on trauma, recovery, and the true cost of sexual violence by Lucia Osborne-Crowley 
• Psychodynamic therapy helped me overcome trauma when CBT couldn’t by Lucia Osborne-Crowley 
• Anger says: This isn’t working for me. Expressing anger requires being willing to be seen, which is why you can express it only when you feel confident that a relationship can contain its emotion and move forward. Since I’d always assumed that my relationships were fragile and weak, and that any moment the other person saw me clearly, they’d leave, I couldn’t risk expressing anger. So I dissociated.
• How to be resilient 
• Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders 
• The first line came to me quickly — “Life is short, though I keep this from my children.”   My Marriage Was Never the Same After That. 
• LOVE AFTER LOVE by Derek Walcott 
• How Relationships Change Over Time by Aella 
• Outsourcing My Orgasm
• I was pissed. I felt myself wanting him to see me upset so he’d feel bad and apologize. Just to make sure we’re all following — I am now playing insecure mind games with a 567 day old child. I think my son hates me. I am not handling it well.
• My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write. Then he plagiarised my work. by Joseph Earp 
• Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either 

10. Career

• Job interviews are a nightmare — and only getting worse 
• Losing My Ambition by Amil Niazi 
• I’d love to tell you I had a glittering career before my three boys came along.  But I can’t, because I was an actor. 
• Confessions of an Ex Philosopher 
• Marshmallow, Ph.D.: How Delayed Gratification is a Recipe for Career Dissatisfaction 
• Not everybody wants to be the main character. Pragmatists thinks they want to be one, does not actually want it. Reluctant hero does not think they want to be main, actually want it. Leaders and Divas think they want to be main, and actually want to be main. 
• Not having a modern phone is a very visible sign of poverty. Being known as poor is generally seen as shameful.
• Despite my somewhat destitute upbringing I am not disappointed in my parents. My vertiginous fall in social class does not feel very vertiginous at all. My mother, who always had high expectations of me, probably rues this fact, but she did prepare me very well for a future on the very bottom of society.
• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill by Ben Kuhn
• Noah Reid on Switching Gears and Making Adjustments
• A theory on the function of bullshit jobs: to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and to provide status and prestige for elites by Aravind "Vinny" Byju
• EJMR Job Market despair threads
• Job market finally broke me 
• Job market is over 
• Feeling Destroyed 
• On dealing with rejection, both as an applicant and as a gatekeeper 
• How to Handle Regrets: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’
• The Seven Levels of Busy 

10. Writing and Words

• The stigma against romance novels is not just because romance novels are seen as something women enjoy, but because it’s seen as something *older* women enjoy.
• What 90s literature is most assigned on English college syllabus?  
• Blunt-force ethnic credibility by Som-Mai Nguyen
• What We Wear: A Reading List on Fashion and Our Complex Relationship to Clothes 
• And then what? The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either. 
• Brandon Sanderson: I don’t write for plot twists, or dragons, or clever turns of phrase—though I enjoy all of these. I write because stories bring people inside. And I sincerely, genuinely believe that is what the world needs. 
• How the ring got good
• Word games: Waffle Game, Wordi, Wordiply 
• The Wordi backstory
• I was asked to invent the next Wordle
• Bots for various books, including the Case Against Education.

11. Miscellanea

• The maintenance race by Stewart Brand 
• We could have universal COVID vaccines very soon — if we urgently reform the process 
• Updated COVID-19 Boosters FAQ 
• The Salt Fix recommends that people eat as much salt as they crave. Red Pen reviews it and decides it  doesn’t make a convincing case that eating salt to our heart’s content is healthier than cutting back on it. 
• Duolinguists: Articles written or selected by Duolingo moderators to help you learn multiple languages.
• Why A4? 
• Making Space For Silence 
• Who Gets "Quality" Leisure? 
• Becoming Athletic In My 50s by Clive Thompson
• Move the knight to every square in order, except don’t land anywhere the queen can take you.
• The Apathetic Agnostic Tabernacle Choir membership entitles you to access our online hymnal and to participate in regular Thursday Choir practice (in the shower.) Invite a friend or two so you can practice your harmonies. 
• On Walking to the Museum, Musing on Beauty 
• In Defence of Garlic in a Jar 
• Rasanya dulu jiwaku bernas!/Penuh pilu, tapi sesekali tahu caranya bergembira/Kenapa sekarang aku lupa? 
• Engaging with the new generation and its media consumption 
• Archetypes Revisited: Who makes us who we are? The people nearby. by Craig Mod
• The ebb and flow of life on a houseboat by Dan Hitchens  
• Overcoming male reproductive greed 
• Something Wicked by Richard Smyth 
• Belajar "Radikalisme" dari George J. Aditjondro 
• John Wesley’s Sermon 50: gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can. “we ought not to gain money at the expense of life, nor (which is in effect the same thing) at the expense of our health; without hurting our neighbour. But this we may not, cannot do, if we love our neighbour as ourselves.” 
• I don't have a hobby: Flashing Palely in the Margins Nov 2021 links