• Virginia Postrel for Works in Progress: Engineering the disposable diaper. I, for one, am grateful that there is no more need for “the knife method” of diaper washing — one guess as to what the knife was used for. The article doesn’t mention that the technology which made baby diapers ever so thinner and easier to transport has also helped microscopy. Knowledge begets knowledge.
• Dynomight (pseud): You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller. On the benefits of acetaminophen, the blind alley of pain medicines.
• Brennan Kenneth Brown: Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics. Just a few week ago my wife and I were talking about the mind-bending difference in magnitude between a googol and a googolplex, and the notations described in this article would have come in handy. More to the point, even farming games not mentioned here like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing do wonders to teach children math.
• Ted Gioia: Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalists. Look, when FT’s Janan Ganesh praised the unexamined life I don’t think he meant going about it like an amoeba. Est modus in rebus.
• Jake Currie for Nautilus: Birds Are More Afraid of Women Than of Men. Submitted without further comment.

The essay is five years old yet I have discovered it just now because the author is also the person behind Denote, a marvelous note-taking tool for Emacs. The tone is not as dry as a scholastic text ⊕ [Note: For a Substack version of a similar message I encourage you to check out Experimental History. The most recent post, for example, is a case study of one particular aspect of scientism — zombie ideas. ] but not as entertaining as something one would find on Substack. The message is unambiguous, and rather than rehash it let me quote one paragraph out of many:

Science as a career choice rather than a disposition towards learning, and an attitude of living in accordance with the principles than (sic!) enable such learning, contributes to the distancing from philosophy and to the degradation of the moral character of those involved. The practitioner who has not been in the least exposed to the rigours of a virtuous modus vivendi is likely to prioritise superficialities that obscure their own intellectual insecurities, such as social status, a growing collection of titles and certificates that are supposed to support one’s appeal to intellectuality, or the emptiness of being celebrated as a force for so-called “progress” and “rationality” among those who are believed to be unfortunate enough not to be scientists. The latter is one of those non-scientific beliefs amplified by the oligopoly of mass media that helps the philosophically deprived science stake its claim as the tutelary figure of the contemporary world, while blithely disregarding its instrumentalisation as both the apologist and militant activist of the power apparatus that enables it.

The author, who chose to drop his surname and go just by Protesilaos thereby making me break the house rule of using last names only when referring to folks, lives in a hut he built himself ⊕ [Note: A hut which brought to mind this recent essay from Joan Westenberg about people retreating from their true calling for years in order to recharge. ] in the mountains of Cyprus. Fascinating stuff, all with a large back catalogue I will be perusing in the months to come.

The last few years have been particularly tricky to tread for people who recognize the difference between science and scientism. If the entire board of the National Science Foundation is fired in one day, is it an attack on science or an attempt to curb scientism? [Note: ¿Por qué no los dos? ] When one of the “Abundance” guys — yes, that book is still on the pile — proposes an unbaked not-even-embryonic scheme for reform, is the rebuke from a seasoned scientist legitimate or just circling the wagons? [Note: Vide supra ] So yes, a retreat to the mountains does sound appealing.

• Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
• Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
• Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. ] This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
• Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.

Another weekend, another free hour to improve Inkling, the 95% Gemini-generated Emacs client for Inkwell. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs — and how great is it that every RSS feed is its own unique snowflake? — I’ve added a bookmark manager for micro.blog’s bookmarks, complete with tagging. Next up: adding drafts to Microbe.

• Subscription Cost Visualizer ⊕ [Note: ᔥSwiss Miss ] , a nifty online tool that is like DaisyDisk for your subscriptions. Wish I had it before the purge for a before and after.
• Joan Westenberg: Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay. The only nit I have to pick with this marvelous essay is that Westenberg mentions Nate Silver, he of old 538, as “one of the more honest figures here” without mentioning his clear conflict of interest.
• David Cain on Raptitude: Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully. A nice reframing of the human condition, which I will add to my list of mental models.
• Peco Gaskovski: Measuring out my life in coffee spoons. The me with and without coffee are indeed a different person, and anyone with whom I’ve crossed paths owes some gratitude to the Ottomans for bringing it to Europe.
• Daniel Franks: on Yi Yi, my favourite movie and why I think everyone must watch it. I am yet to see it, but it is on the list!

• Monopolized by David Dayen, which Cory Doctorow recommended in response to my account from last week of the medical billing/phone scam rabbit-duck. Doctorow wrote about the book in more detail back in 2021 and yes it is now on the pile as is everything else below.
• The Credibility Crisis in Science ⊕ [Note: ↬ Joel Hamill ] by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, and if the subtitle “Tweakers, Fraudsters, and the Manipulation of Empirical Results” whets your appetite there is an excerpt available in Nautilus.
• The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay, who have had a blog of the same name for more than a decade, so it is a true mystery why an article in The Dispatch about the “gentlemanosphere” ⊕ [Note: ↬ Reader John ] chose to highlight overtestosteroned almost-douchebags such as Scott Galloway as the anti-manosphere crusaders rather than McKay. Haha, I’m joking, of course it’s not a mystery: Galloway gets more clicks, taps, swipes or rather the preferred method of interaction is nowadays. He also has a new book out, to which I shall not link.
• The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks, which someone recommended on The Honest Broker Podcast, a show that combines some of my least favorite things about this decade: Substack and using the word “podcast” to describe a video of two men talking. Still, the transcript makes for good reading and the book seems something worth keeping at the bedside, at least aspirationally.

• Matt Novak on Bluesky: “Let’s talk about tonight…”. Behold the banality of evil.
• Scott Sumner: The odd disappearance of the business cycle. In which an economist wonders why everyone is so down on the economy when the numbers tell us that we live in financial nirvana. Well I can think of a few reasons thanks to Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter. Her “Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy” from December 2025 addresses Sumner’s confusion head on.
• Joan Westenberg: Why I quit “The Strive”. Westenberg doesn’t call it that, but she describes the founder trap — a funhouse mirror version of the upper middle class trap. Indeed, her article fits neatly into Wednesday’s congames.
• Adam Ruben for Science: Cite unseen: when AI hallucinates scientific articles. The preeminent scientific journal discovers hallucinations. The moral is that those who ask Kenneth the page to write their dissertation deserve everything they get.
• Bonus: Little Snitch for Linux. An OG MacOS app now has a proper Linux version. May it be a sign of things to come.

• Venkatesh Rao: On Cooling America Out. Rao is back and in rare form, expanding on a 1952 paper about conmen and their victims. In the process, he describes a leg of the American elephant not often discussed:

The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.

Because, of course, only the paranoid survive.

• Ian Betteridge: The worst of us. Betteridge starts with a note on the wonderfully-named Claude Mythos but soon jumps over to my favorite short story. I won’t spoil the ending.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Upper Middle Class Trap. Maggiulli tries to explain some recent observations. His conclusion is similar to Rao’s: the con is nearing its end. Get out if you still can.
• Terry Godier: Body Language. What Godier is doing isn’t blogging. It’s performance art.

• Reddit video: Artemis ll launch from Kennedy Space Center seen from an United Airlines flight. Better than anything you could have seen from NASA.
• YouTube video: Hanged by a comma. The whole channel is wonderful! (ᔥMiraz Jordan)
• Podcast audio: Slice of GTD Life with Scott Adams. Of course generative AI would come for our to-do lists.
• Web comic: Groan up. I have been following Wondermark for almost two decades and I’m glad David Malki is back at it. The most recent one was 👌
• Reddit screenshot: Notable Seattle-based travel writer and millionaire, Rick Steves, voices his thoughts on new “Millionaire Tax”. I have loved Rick Steves since around 2008 when I held his guide to Italy like a bible during a 1-month trip. I now love him even more.
• Web log: MVP thoughts. This is from Doc Searls, who makes a beautiful case for Tyrese Haliburton being this season’s MVP despite not playing a single game. The most informative experiments are ones where you take a single thing away.

• Scott Sumner: Too good to be true. Sumner has a PhD in economics and a storied academic career but you don’t need either to confirm his observation that Congress punishes savers and rewards spendthrifts. And in that they are merely following the current animal spirits of the country: behold credit scores plummeting when you pay off your mortgage. Cui bono?
• Joan Westenberg: The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs. Certainly not the poor shmucks setting up yet another Amazon enshitiffier dropshipping storefront. As Westenberg points out, far worse than their job of enshittifying my online shopping experience is the opportunity cost: what could have these would-be entrepreneurs done had they not paid $1,000 for a get-rich-quick course? And if you liked that article, do see her [Notes on going solo][2a]. The mind bristles with possible applications for a solo practice.
• Aidan Walker: what would Whitman do?. And what could possibly be more American than a solo practice? After all, it is a country that emphasizes individuality over the communal for better or worse. But of course culture changes all the time and as eternal as this state of affairs seems to have been, Walker reminds us that it is no older than the second half of the 20th century. Before then, and certainly in the time of Lincoln, the themes were:

Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

• Jorge Arango: Robots in the Garden. But with solidarity dead or dying we have LLMs to turn to. Behold a proposed collective of 9 algorithms to serve as your amanuenses. This may even make me go back to computer note-taking! Arango has a book about that very topic, now on the pile.