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” 

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