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Sunday links, money money money

…doesn’t spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you’d better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.

See what makes money and do it! A plan so fool-proof it is a true mystery why everyone isn’t a billionaire.

Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.

Spot on! Somewhat surprisingly, Gelman’s never heard of Charlie Munger but if I had to pick a billionaire to “worship” (not that I would ever do such a thing), he could be the one. Certainly not Stevehole Jobs, and certainly not Munger’s partner Warren B.

This is the meat of the issue, and kudos to Moriarty for putting it so bluntly. Each billionaire’s billions were built on the backs of real people doing real work while missing family events, growing stomach ulcers and ultimately dying of cancer. If you think this is an exaggeration, do read a few accounts of what happens in even supposedly “good” multinationals. Well-meaning and good-hearted minnows never grow large enough to have to hide their money in Ireland. Financialization squeezed out their blood, sweat and tears and concentrated them into a handful of people who were clearly not well. Mirroring what happens to companies, those who have a firm grasp of morality and a sense of self never get to the first billion. In that light, I don’t think relying on the billionaire class to “fix” anything — or even to correctly identify the problem — is a sensible idea, so it is a good thing indeed that the country celebrating its 250th birthday this year has a track record of putting them in their place.

Thursday links, a mish-mash

Wednesday links, in which we say goodbye to the last remnants of the 20th century

Book reviews make for great essays, particularly when the reviewer vehemently disagrees with the author’s main premise. The author here is Michael McFaul, a 1990s style liberal democrat who, much like his neoliberal counterparts can’t see that his project failed and therefore cannot even conceive of taking responsibility for that failure. Lynch takes him to task.

Where the reliably sensible Karpathy provides an update on how he uses LLMs for programming and, well ᔥTyler Cowen:

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Of course, I would have named it slopocalypse instead of slopacolypse but, you know, potato potatoe.

Both Windows and and MacOS have become sufficiently sloppy that people are looking for an exit. This will be the decade of Linux, and it already started with the Steam Deck about which I haven’t written anything here but have discussed briefly in a podcast (Serbian only).

Scenarios on how physicians may respond to recent developments, with a Focus, Fight, or Build phenotype. At a glance it may look like the Build phenotype may be the “correct” one, but of course Vartabedian correctly points out that these people may soon enough become bullshit artists themselves. These are my words, not his. Dr Vartabedian was much more measured:

The problem I find is that a lot of builders aren’t in the trenches for long. They move into startups or administrative positions. And as they evolve, their view of medicine becomes fixed. And when you’re not struggling with the realities of an inbox, you begin to solve for a world that doesn’t exist.

This is something I also noticed, many years ago.

An LLM-generated music video for millennials ᔥKevin Kelly which is getting a lot of attention because of course the quick cuts and incoherence of Sora and others are perfect for the medium. This is why people thinking that MTV shut down when it actually didn’t was so salient: its former viewers are being made to think that everyone will soon enough be spinning their own music videos set to their own (kind of) music.

🎙️ A few podcast episodes of note, January 2026

I was down on podcasts at the beginning of the year, but three weeks into the year there were quite a few worth highlighting:

Monday links, ever more self-referential

Friday links, for reading on a snowy day to come

Have a great weekend, everyone, and if you are in most of the US hope you enjoy the snow more than you dread it.

Thursday links, voices of young adults (which is to say any adult younger than me)

  • Kyla Scanlon: The Great Entertainment. Scanlon doesn’t mention the author or the book, but it is hard not to read her latest essay and not picture David Foster Wallace looking at the news stream of the past year, shaking his head. Because the world he conjured in Infinite Jest is, in fact, becoming real. So maybe his other essay wasn’t as outdated as I had thought.
  • Aidan Walker: Clavicular and contentmaxxing. I don’t know about DFW but I was shaking my head throughout… this. One of the many benefits of middle-age is that I don’t know have to know about everything that the kids are up to. Price increases soon!
  • Kei Kreutler: Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity. So, I noted recently as an aside that people were worried about the detrimental effects of writing on people’s ability to memorize. Well apparently this particular spinoff of the golden age fallacy predates even writing, as people were worried that particular memorization techniques like the memory palace would spoil the people’s “true” capability to remember. So maybe this is also a type of an appeal to nature? (↬Writing Slowly)
  • Andrew Sharp: Five Questions About Victor Wembanyama. Oh my, Wemby does seem insufferable, and this is from someone who makes a point to read at least a page or two every day. At least he is not a flopper.

The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.

Saturday links, romanticizing rot

Friday links, with long weekend reads about storytellers and voyeurs

  • David Foster Wallace for Review of Contemporary Fiction (1993): E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction. On television as voyeurism-enabling best friend of a young fiction writer, among other things. Look, I know it is too long because DFW loves his asides and his self-references, but in year 2026 those make the actual value of the essay: any points he had about network versus cable TV and how those two affect American fiction have become irrelevant as all three of those things are now dead or dying. So, sit down and savor it if you haven’t already — they stopped making DFW essays, you know! — possibly with a better formatted if somewhat distorted PDF version.
  • Sam Kean for Slate (2014): Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient. I have used the case of Phineas Gage in an old lecture as an example of a “natural experiment”, and the amount of uncertainty about him this essay reveals makes me think it was an even better choice than I originally thought. Gage’s personality differs with each retelling, shifting to match the point being made; call it the narrative degree of freedom. No one, not even scientists — heck, particularly not scientists — is immune to a good yarn.
  • Gay Talese for The New Yorker (2016): The Voyeur’s Motel. Like this essay from the great — and still alive! — Talese. He was 84 when he wrote the essay about things that happened back in the 1960s through the ’80s. How much of it was true? And for what purpose did he end up putting it to paper? This reviewer was skeptical, but please hold off from reading the review until after you read the essay, because of course you have the time.
  • Terry Eagleton for London Review of Books (2023): What’s your story? This is a review you should read before the book — I certainly did. The book reviewed, Seduced by Story, will not make its way on to the pile as I have long ago internalized the point it seems to be wanting to make. The review, on the other hand, is a delightful reference to other people’s work on the subject, including that

Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that Donald Rumsfeld’s sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom – his litany of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – lacks a fourth permutation: unknown knowns, things we know but don’t know we know, a more suggestive notion of ideology than Brooks’s systems of extremist ideas.

An example of an unknown “known” Eagleton plops in a preceding paragraph:

Brooks also refers to myths as ideology, but makes the classic liberal mistake of overlooking his own. Along with most Americans, he probably believes in Nato, the free market and private education, but it’s unlikely he would call this an ideology. Like halitosis, ideology is what the other guy has.

But then we are getting into headier topics than simple storytelling.