Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.

Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.

📚 Finished reading: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, the intellectual basis for THS. An important book when it first came out in 1943 and even more important now when embryos are being selected for their longevity and human intelligence reduced to a large language model.

📚 Finished reading: The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis, which I started after a nudge from Kyla Scanlon. A book both timeless and timely, for the reasons she listed and many more on top.

📚 Finished reading: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. Much like Nassim Taleb who started with probability and statistics only to end in the territory of ethics and values, Meadows starts with algorithms and quantities but ends with higher purpose and transcendence. A book to be re-read.

After finishing The Space Trilogy I was wondering which of C.S. Lewis’s many books I should read next. Well, Kyla Scanlon has just nudged me in the right direction with her Economic Lessons from the Screwtape Letters:

In Screwtape, evil doesn’t arrive through fire and fury. It creeps in through ease, comfort, and optimization. Screwtape wants to nudge people into passivity as a way of capturing their souls. Let them scroll. Let them spend. Let them smooth away all friction until they wake up hollow and can’t remember why.

Sounds about right.

Today, I learned about The Chandler Project, a doomed attempt to build a next-generation “personal information manager”, and it is wonderful. Just look at this beauty! Sadly, the project went bust more than a decade ago — the last update was in 2009 — but many thanks to whomever is paying to keep the lights on.

The initial development and decline of Chandler was described in the book Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg which, yes, is now on the pile. (↬Thinking With Tinderbox)

📚 Thinking With Tinderbox continues to pay dividends, even though I am not learning anything about the app’s mechanics. One of the footnotes led me to About This Particular Outliner and its parent, ATP Macintosh and now I am thinking about the greatness of pre-2016 Internet. Quite the rabbit hole.

📚 Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which as a — spoiler alert — sucker for escape rooms and weird aliens I very much appreciated. I haven’t gotten to reading or watching The Martian yet, but if it either is half as good as Weir’s second offering it will be worth checking out.

Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:

René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.

These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.

FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?

“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.

Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:

• alive (or at least active) now, and
• capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.

A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.

That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:

• “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”

Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.

Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.

But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?

📚 Finished reading: The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis:

• Out of the Silent Planet: A space travel story that is closer in flavor to Jules Vernes than Isaac Asimov. Had to remember that Martian channels were still a thing back in 1938. More nudity than I expected for a book of that time.
• Perelandra: What if you could be there when the serpent persuaded Eve to take a bite of the apple? With even more nudity, and a tedious end sequence that is more fit for an early Disney cartoon.
• That Hideous Strength: A biting satire of bureaucracy and social striving, with body horror, even more nudity, and a delicious R-rated end sequence that is as far away from Disney as you could possibly imagine even if again animals play a crucial role. It is twice the size of the first two books combined and well worth the time spent savoring it.