• Corey Ford: The Forwardable Email. How to make email introductions easier for everyone involved. I have been a big proponent of avoiding work emails ever since I read Cal Newport’s book, but they are essential for external communication and bringing people together is a common use case. I have bookmarked the site and will be using it frequently. (↬Ben Werdmuller)
• Jamie Hardesty on LinkedIn: LinkedIf. Since I never actually log in to LinkedIn, I encountered this as a screenshot on Thought Shrapnel. Remember that observation about the small-i internet?
• Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World. I am typing this in markdown and previewing it in Brett Terpstra’s wonderful Marked 3, so I devoured this history-slash-analysis. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
• Saahil Desai for The Atlantic: America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster. Let’s leave the bad news for last. Maybe the story isn’t that everything is becoming financilized but rather that everything has become gambling. We have removed the Chesterton’s fence of gambling being taboo and now it’s everywhere. Maybe there was a reason our ancestors frowned upon it?

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

• 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 So maybe his other essay wasn’t as outdated as I had thought.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.

• Ted Gioia: 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism. Consider this the antidote to the techno-optimist bullshitfesto manifesto. It rings true.
• Chris Arnade: Engineering as Humanity’s Highest Achievement. But then so des the title of Arnade’s latest essay. The answer, of course, is est modus in rebus, including engineering.
• Ed Zitron: This Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble. “This” being the AI boom, which is putting its final putrid touches on the American rot economy.
• Lily Lynch: Europa.–Make War.–Zenitism.. Wherein Lynch attempts to triangulate one of the distant sources of the rot, which is the hypocrisy built into the foundations of the post-WW2 economy. I will add Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991) to my to-watch list.
• Kabir Chibber: What rewatching ‘The Wire’ taught me about nostalgia for a lost America. Here are more proximal sources. I remember watching the last season of The Wire in 2008 while on medical student exchange in Thailand. I spent the last two weeks on Koh Samui and passed the too-hot early afternoons in front of a tiny Asus Eee netbook (remember those?) watching Season 5, which back then I thought was too far-fetched in how it portraid the media. Maybe I should rewatch.
• Hollis Robbins: Embrace your lack. Let’s end on a positive note, with a review of another great TV show. I didn’t think that Pluribus was about LLMs at all, but Robbins makes a convincing case for a connection. May need to rewatch that one as well, and Season 2 isn’t event out yet.

• 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.

• Kevin Kelly: How Will the Miracle Happen Today?. Kelly, age 73, looks back at his days as a hitchhiker and describes what it was like to feel that the universe was conspiring to help you:

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.

How many adults younger than, say, 45, would have anything but a deeply cynical take to the above?

• Rachel Kwon: Bye 2025. OK, I may have found one such person as these memories of a particularly harrowing year end on a much more hopeful note than anything I would have written if all of it had happened to me.

• Branko Milanović: Was the world of the 1990s better than today’s? Betteridge’s law of headlines easily applies even without taking into account that the 1990s were particularly rough in my then-home country. In particular:

Thus almost all that was believed in the 1990 was either proven wrong, or was self-serving. Hypocrisy’s uncontested rule relegated any daring or alternative opinions to the lunatic fringe. Freedom of expression in the ideologically dominant part of the world was not controlled by the thought police but was controlled by the mandarins of knowledge and requirements for success. They asphyxiated the thought and created a wooden language that distorted reality. Everybody knew what to think (or at least what to say) to get ahead. It was ideologically a barren period where clichés were regarded as ultimate accomplishments of human thought. Today’s world may not be better but is certainly intellectually freer.

• Luis Garciano: A New Year’s letter to a young person. On how to choose a career path that won’t easily be replaced by AI, with a head-nod to oncology. I am myself partial to plumbing. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

• Casey Newton: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit. It fooled me as well. Interestingly, I would not have found out had I not boosted this Mastodon post and had Ivory notify me about the edit. Caveat lector!
• Brent Donnelly: It’s Not Just X, It’s Y. The article gives voice to the feeling I get reading much of the small-i internet. It ends with a tip sheet that includes this valuable advice: “Assume long form articles on Substack and Twitter are AI-generated unless there is reason to believe otherwise.” Indeed.
• Steven Bush for the FT: AI cannot take responsibility for human faults. But of course, AI doesn’t lie to people, people do. “Machines cannot claim moral agency. Even if a human’s role is just to come in at the end, tidy up the more difficult bits or adjudicate on properly knotty problems, they must accept responsibility for the outcome.”
• Derek Lowe: A Clinical Trial Nightmare. And it isn’t just AI we should we worried about, and not only online. Lowe points to a particularly horrific example of clinical trial misconduct, this time in a few drive-by research clinics in South Florida. And here I don’t know which is worse, that a small startup didn’t know better and fell for the scheme, or that they paid $35M for the privilege to be scammed. But that is what happens when the whole ecosystem is rotten.

I take back what I wrote about Tapestry: it is not just a pretty face but a genuinely useful pan-media viewer that even takes cross posts into account (see below). Genuinely impressed!

• Steven Johnson: Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians. A serialized account of the earliest, pre-historic civilizations, which will also come with its very own LLM chatbot? Sign me up! Johnson has been a subject matter expert for Google’s NotebookLM project since back when it was called Project Tailwind, so it is not a surprise that he is also its promoter. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• Joseph Epstein for The Free Press: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands. Although only mentioned in passing, any essay that highlights the idiocy of transcendetalists gets my recommendation. See also, and in much greater detail, Venkatesh Rao’s description of waldenponding.
• Joan Westenberg: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation. A well-made dig at Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk is also much appreciated, as is this exquisite critique of Joe Rogan and the entire marathon-length podcasting enterprise:

A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can’t fact-check something as easily when it’s buried in hour two of a podcast. You can’t easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

• Molly White: The year of technoligarchy. An account of the last five years in tech with a looks towards 2026, in which “[w]e’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.” Kyla Scanlon hit similar notes last month.
• John Nerst: 2025: The Final Final Year. Always good to see signs of life from a blog I thought was defunct. Nerst is close to publishing a book, “Competitive Sensemaking”, which is a topic he has covered in the blog since 2016 (!?) and one that has gotten ever-more relevant since then (see Westenberg, White and Scanlon above). So, I will gladly add Nerst’s book to the pile once it is out, and would happily preorder it, if only there were a way to do so.
• Nikita Prokopov: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. A beautifully illustrated case against the new MacOS visuals. Like I needed another reason to ditch Apple.

• Jason Kelly on X: The crisis in biotech startups is not just “biotech being cyclical” - you can see clearly that the rise in Chinese startups is not cyclical over the last 25 years - it’s spiking up in the last 10 years (see chart below from @AsimovPress). This is in response to a post from Bruce Booth arguing that the rise in Chinese biotech is not just a threat for the US but also an opportunity, and one that should be a cause for optimism. Booth responded in turn. I am close to finishing Apple in China and based on that alone I tend to side with Kelly. Riding dragons is a dangerous business, as both Apple and Tesla have found out in their respective industries. There are, of course, a few ways in which biotech is significantly different from cars and phones that requires some more thinking, but that is for a different post.
• Cory Doctorow on Mastodon: On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Not just post-American but post-Chinese Internet as well, so this is a talk about robustness and dare I say antifragility through decentralization, not anti-imperialist rambling (although this being Doctorow there is some of that sprinkled in too). A video version is also available.
• Matthew Dowd on X: Pickle Expose: Sliced and Diced. Engrossing article in the form of a full-blown X post, with links, in-line images and half-decent typography. (ᔥJohn Gruber))
• Katyayani Shukla on X: Warren Buffett literally gave a free 1-hour masterclass on business. I saw the video and thought that Mr. Buffet was looking unusually spry for a 95-year-old! Well, the speech is from July 18, 2001 and is available in both YouTube video and transcript form, so there was no need for contextless X posts with worse quality video and audio. This particular one got 7.5 thousand likes and 2 thousand reposts in less than two days. I guess not everyone appreciates context and citation as much as I do. (ᔥJohn Mandrola, also on X)

Note: Despite three of the four links being from X, I have to admit that I am finding Mastodon more and more enjoyable and the superior of the four post-Twitter offerings, at least for me and my tastes. I am still vacillating on whether I should just use my micro.blog account to follow all non-X users, but then Ivory is too good of an app not to use. Advice appreciated.