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