Today I learned — from my 4-year-old, no less! — that house flies are among the top 10 non-bee pollinator families. Numbers 1 and 2 are also in the fly family. Is it time to retire our swatter?

The Washington Post has your weekend reading covered: “He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable”.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

So it goes…

🍿 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) was a delight, even at 2 hours. As the first Studio Ghibli movie it has been overshadowed by what came later, but its influence is obvious. Inside Ghibli itself, there is one-to-one mapping of characters (Captain Dola becomes Yubaba from Spirited Away, her husband becomes Kamaji) and plot points (a boy protecting a magical girl in Ponyo). Externally, the robots are echoed in The Iron Giant and Wall-E. Doesn’t the latest Zelda have a flying castle? And of course it is one of the first popular steampunk anime.

I will also note that the movie is almost 40 years old: it came out the same year as Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee. But good luck getting your kids to watch either. Incredible how much more gracefully animation ages compared to live-action.

Always good to see a friend’s work out in the wild. This is Bump by Matt Wallace in the tweens section of Politics and Prose.

And so my trip to San Francisco ended with a 3-hour flight delay by United “for mechanical reasons” and a 3:30am touchdown at Dulles airport. At least it wasn’t a 737 MAX.

📚 Finished reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen, and I don’t yet have an answer to my question on its Straussian — Tylerspeak for hidden — meaning. The book is despicable in some places: are you sure you want to pick people committed to their families if that means they will choose to spend time with them over doing more work? — yes, this had struck a nerve — and admirable in others: how to help people who are far from the center of the action in their selected field to even imagine what they can achieve?

I would place it in the “narrow, temporary” quadrant of the breadth/timelessness 2-by-2. It is not for everyone, and it won’t last very long. To pick an example, Cowen and Gross suggest that employers should increase their profile — by blogging, writing books, doing podcasts, basically by doing what Tyler is doing — to increase their profile and the reach of their “soft” network and, ultimately, get more self-referrals from prospective talents who have heard about them. If everyone was to do this, would be it of net benefit to the whole system? I would argue not: the benefit would be to the most prolific and vocal talent-seekers at the expense of an immense amount of noise and all around confusion. And fifty years from now, will people have known about podcasts and blogs? Lindy says no. This doesn’t mean that the book is bad! It’s just not one of the “great” books.

Compare this to my gold standard of a broad/timeless — great — contemporary book: anything from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, which is coincidentally what taught me about the Lindy effect. If everyone were to internalize its views and the dense network of mental models it brings to the extend they can, and act accordingly, the world would be a bit less of a madhouse. The concepts it talks about being about probability, it is also timeless.

So if your goal is to read only “great” books, well, first of all don’t read anything that came out in the last 5–10 years. But if you want to read “great” book candidates — which I am, let’s be clear, not trying to do this year but may try for 2025 — well, in that case, feel free to give Talent a pass.

Amusingly, one year ago to the day I wrote about On Bullshit, a broad, timeless, Great book if there ever was one.

A proposal to reform the NIH intramural program that makes a whole lot of sense. (ᔥTyler Cowen who recently linked to another new-to-me science blog that is quite good. A Blogroll update is long overdue.)