• Lily Lynch for The Ideas Letter: Cold War Fixations.

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.

• Andrej Karpathy on X: A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

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.

• Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu: From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: Why I Made the Switch.

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).

• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Adaptive Stances of Doctors.

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.

• @AutismCapital on X: Severus Snape - ALWAYS (LIVE at Hogwarts) 🔥🔥🔥

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.

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

• Statecraft: What’s Wrong with NIH Grants. A level-headed view at the Lovecraftian horror that is the federal grants system, from someone who has been in that world for almost two decades. As I noted previously, anyone who wants to reform NIH should first understand it, and the interviewee Scott Kupor seems to know it well.
• Stratechery paycast: An Interview with United CEO Scott Kirby About Tech Transformation. United is one of the airlines that started suffering enshittification, but then seems to be turning around largely because of the customer-oriented approach of their CEO who is using their web platform to (shock! horror!) improve the travellers' experience. Of course, everything can be re-enshittified.
• Cory Doctorow: The Post-American Internet. Doctorow’s speech on how to make re-enshittification impossible, which has been particularly salient recently. The link is to the transcript. I have no idea how to link to that particular episode of the podcast on its own website — and if it even has one — so here is the link on Overcast.
• The Incomparable Mothership: Chekhov’s Chunga Palm. A herd of geeks discusses Pluribus — adorable in the best way possible.

• Sam Rodriques: The Humanity Project. The underlying assumption of this proposal is that the magic of AI will bring about thousands of new molecules and hypotheses on how they work, and that many of them will require testing in humans, and that we therefore better streamline how clinical trials are designed and run by yes, using LLMs. It is the healthcare ouroboros, now loaded with AI!
• Andrew Losowsky for The Markup: We posted a job. Then came the AI slop, impersonator and recruiter scam. Yet more ways in which LLMs are making hiring challenging, both upstream and downstream of my limited experience with meetings. (ᔥBen Werdmuller)
• Nick Schaden: Can the gaming industry adapt to a frozen market?. Gaming being among things suffering death by cloud was not on my radar but of course that it is! Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite are all “games as a service”, i.e. platforms, i.e. stasis generators. Now to find a way to explain to my kids why they are not allowed to spend any more time on Forsaken…
• Richard Griffiths: The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book. I never saw these lists of links as a commonplace book stand-in, but of course they are. Even the find-the-common-theme game was already there (which, duh, it is a common-place book)! I am, of course, closer to the illusion of integrated thought end of the spectrum so thank you for bearing with me, dear reader.

• 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.