• “Let me know…” → “Tell me…”
• “No problem” → “You’re welcome”
• “Excuse me” → “Get out of my way”
• “They’re reasonable” → “They agree with us”
• “That makes sense” → “I acknowledge what you said without agreeing or disagreeing”

What else?

From McSweeney’s SELECTIONS FROM H.P. LOVECRAFT’S BRIEF TENURE AS A WHITMAN’S SAMPLER COPYWRITER:

Chocolate Cherry Cordial: You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question, “What is toffee, exactly?” All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane.

There are others as well and they are all outstanding. (ᔥAlex Wiltshire in a footnote of a rather excellent blog post which I don’t want to spoil here but is also to do with Lovecraft)

In anticipation of the new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack arriving by mail — alas, the new delivery date is February 15 — I have been mulling over the more unusual mental models I’ve adopted since first reading about the latticework. The latticework is a mental model of its own — a meta-mental model, if you will — and you would do well to adopt some all of Mungers. The five I list here aren’t the models you will find in the Almanack, but I would not have identified them as such and remembered them were it not for Munger’s wisdom. ⊕ The links are to Wikipedia and journal articles, for now, but I hope to write a detailed account of my own for each, you know, once I get around to it.

1. C.H. Waddington’s probability landscape, which has applications far beyond developmental biology, where it was first introduced;
2. Activation energy, especially as it relates to motivation and administrative inertia;
3. Epiphenomena as real and tangible things and not nuisances to be brushed aside, which I realized via both Hofstadter and Girard;
4. Phenotypic plasticity, which we take for granted at the level of an organism (in an environment of caloric abundance mammals will get fat) but not so much at higher and lower scales, i.e., cells and societies;
5. Carcinization, the nature’s attempt to evolve every crustacean into a crab five separate times, or, as I like to see it, nature’s way of telling us that hyper-optimization is seductive but ultimately a dead end — and again, mind the scale.

These five are interconnected in interesting ways, and if you arrange the arrows just right they do for a mini-lattice. Kudos to Munger for finding the right term. Munger discussed his own mental models in detail in the Almanack and they form a larger, but still loose, network.

The web of mental models is, of course, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, built so densely and interconnected so profusely that Branko Milanović was right to laud is as a new type of writing. And in fact of the five models I listed, the first one — Waddington’s probability landscape — is a neat bridge between Taleb’s investigations and the other four. But that is a discussion for a future time.

My list for the year, ordered by similarity. All are physical prints already on the bookshelf, just waiting to be snubbed for whatever else catches my attention.

1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
2. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
3. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. That We May Live by various authors
6. Liberation Day by George Saunders
7. You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison
8. Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
9. False Dawn by John Gray
10. A Theater of Envy by René Girard
11. Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee
12. Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud
13. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
14. Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. A Man of Iron by Troy Senik
17. The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
18. Metamathematics by Stephen Wolfram
19. Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Taleb
20. Towards a Theoretical Biology by C.H. Waddington
21. Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin
22. Seeing with Fresh Eyes by Edward Tufte
23. A Guide for the Perplexed by Werner Herzog
24. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Here are the wishlists for 2022 and 2023, and the respective outcomes.

At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 23 books. Mission accomplished? As expected, my favorite of the year was not on that wish list.

Here are all 23, ordered by some semblance of category.

1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison: Harrison at his best, just don’t expect a neat resolution.
2. Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison: a fitting end to my favorite sci-fi trilogy.
3. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: if Harrison awards someone a Booker, I’d better read their book.
4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: the translation was good, but I imagine the original was even better.
5. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline: I think about the Bronze Age collapse more than I do about the Roman Empire, actually.
6. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt: the year of LLM-generated garbage was a good time to refresh BS knowledge.
7. The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset: prophetic.
8. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber: bad.
9. The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel: investing should be left to the professionals.
10. Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand: half of the book is good, but only time will tell which half.
11. How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia: got me to buy an actual CD player, just so I could listen to this anthology.
12. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend: his statement that in science “anything goes” could have been controversial only to those who willfully misunderstood.
13. Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman: too pedantic.
14. Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper: almost a year in and I am still using index cards, although not in the way Scott intended.
15. Writing with Style: The Economist Guide by Lane Greene: more fun than a style guide should be.
16. Zombies in Western Culture by John Vervaeke et al: true and unnerving.
17. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási: don’t be fooled by the self-help title, it is a good book.
18. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis: the most influential of the books I’ve read this year as it led directly to my favorite.
19. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: the best book I’ve read this year, and one that I’ve been thinking about the most.
20. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton: I should read it again.
21. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter: how a scientist deals with grief.
22. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken: how a Christian deals with grief.
23. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: I still can’t believe she was in her 20s.

Not too bad, considering we had a flooded basement and our second move in three years, with some writing wedged in between. And here is last year’s list.

I look forward to removing other people’s requests from Apple Music recommendations. Maybe the 2024 Top 10 list will reflect my actual (poor) taste. Until then:

1. The Schuyler Sisters (Hamilton cast)
2. Peaches (Jack Black)
3. Alexander Hamilton (Hamilton cast)
4. History Has Its Eyes On You (Hamilton cast)
5. Wait For It (Leslie Odom, Jr.)
6. Satisfied (Hamilton cast)
7. Viva La Vida (Coldplay)
8. Aaron Burr, Sir (Hamilton cast)
9. A Sky Full of Stars (Coldplay)
10. You’ll Be Back (Jonathan Groff)

And here is last year’s list.

Only six movies that came out this year made it to my watch list:

• Oppenheimer: three movies in one, and only one of them was good.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: forgettable.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: easily the best of the lot.
• Elemental: initially a disappointment, but has more depth the more I think about it.
• Barbie: better than Oppenheimer but also too long and not very good by the end.
• The Family Plan: a fun throwback to the 1990s, but also forgettable.

I did not see Killers of the Flower Moon yet, but I hope to do so soon. I did watch a bunch of older movies, some of which were quite good, but naming them all here would not mean much (and you can always go to the movies tag). Let me instead list the movies I rewatched this year, in the order in which they came out:

• The Godfather (1972)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended ed. (2001), and notice the 1980s and ’90s-sized gap there.
• The Ring (2002), the rare horror movie that is actually scary.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which is the parents' best friend when in need of a teachable moment.
• Gone Girl (2014), in which Ben Affleck is watchable (a rarity).
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and I still won’t forgive myself for watching this movie on the plane the first time around.

Every year I time myself that I should watch more movies, and every year television wins out. May 2024 be the same.

It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:

• The Last of Us, which I have to thank for making my wife interested in something video game-related. Because Pedro Pascal is in it, to be clear, but I’ll take it.
• Severance would have been even better if played at 1.25x. The office party scene was masterful, though, and at the right speed.
• Slow Horses, Season 2 and Season 3 were the best 12 hours of live-action TV this year.
• Ted Lasso, Season 3 was a disappointment the more I think about it, so I try to think about it less.
• The Bear, Season 2 was the opposite of Lasso and I look forward to Season 3.
• Guy’s Grocery Games was a bad habit which we broke shortly after I wrote about it.
• The Afterparty, Season 2, which was… fine, but a bit too West coast for my taste. Unlike…
• Only Murders in the Building, Season 3, which hit just the right spot. The soundtrack is still a hit with the family on our rides to school.
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake was the perfect sequel to the original.
• Bodies were a nice surprise, although Primer (2004) is still the only one with time travel that makes sense.
• The Great British Baking Show, Season who-knows-which had some of the “worst” contestants to date — quotation marks here because they were all good both in personality and baking skills — but some of the best moments, so one of the better seasons overall.
• Scavengers Reign were the best 6 hours of any TV this year. Not for everyone, to be sure, but I hope it will be for enough people for their flaky Warner/Discovery corporate overlords to order another season.

Last year’s list is here.

My podcast diet has become stale. I work from home more, commute less, and have decided not to wear AirPods when others are around, With a family of five this means no more than 30–45 minutes in the early morning before anyone else is up. And those minutes are filled with the usual suspects, which continue to be fine, but they are also two elderly economists with similar views. Where’s the variety?

So, here is an aspirational list of things I will try out in 2024. Be warned: a few years ago I put Lex Friedman’s podcast on a similar list, and apologized profusely after realizing it was a good cure for insomnia and not much else. As always, caveat lector.

• Who Killed JFK looks like someone was playing podcast Mad Libs. (Seasoned journalist) Soledad O’Brien and (B-list celebrity) Rob Reiner discuss (a controversial topic) the JFK assassination. I vaguely remember O’Brien from The Site, back when MSNBC was trying to live up to its first two initials and went all tech all the time. What strange turn of events got her to host a conspiracy theory podcast?
• The Vergecast got on the Maybe list after the POSSE episode. I bumped it up to the Regulars after their In Memoriam to Twitter. I foresee many skipped episodes — 1–2 hours twice per week feels exhausting — but I also skip plenty of ATP and still get enough out of it to be a member.
• Life and Art from FT Weekend is the audio version of the second-best part of FT (the best being the daily Big Read), so how couldn’t it be good? I’m about to find out!
• Conversations with Coleman is what I imagine Tyler Cowen’s podcast would be if he weren’t an old white economist. I also think it’s time I finally started listening to a podcast by someone significantly younger.
• Greatest of All Talk is already on my list, so this is a bit of a downgrade. While I enjoy listening to basketball talk, three hours each week is just too much. This is the year I’ll decide whether to cut it off completely.

If the links above were not explicit enough, here are my actual regulars: ATP, EconTalk, Conversations with Tyler, with a sprinkling of The Talk Show and Dithering. They all feature prominently in years past: 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one.

I consider myself to be a fairly proficient user of English as a second language, but there are some things I will never get right:

• Using a “W” when a “V” would do (like in woodoo voodoo; and yes, just like Chekov).
• Pronouncing “iron” correctly.
• Understanding whether “substituting X for Y” means that you used to have “X” and now you have “Y” or vice versa.
• Using em-dashes without—yes, without—any surrounding spaces.

The first two are entirely my fault, the third runs contrary to most other languages, but the last one is just dumb and that rule should be abolished.