📚 Finished reading: Feline Philosophy by John Gray promised cats, delivered a brief review of old philosophers. This is a book that could have been a listicle, and a forgettable one at that.

Weekend mood (taken yesterday at the Norfolk Zoo)

Today’s FT essay on the rise of the anti-vaccine movement was a miss. Instead of asking why so many people lost trust in institutions it goes straight to politics: 10 paragraphs on Germany’s AfD, no mention of whether some of the people’s concerns were valid. With that, the movement can only grow.

Happy Twin Peaks Day, everyone! To go with your morning coffee and cherry pie, here is an interview with the Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino on how David Lynch’s masterpiece influenced her own show.

📚 Finished reading: A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher, which someone on X recommended after seeing my book list for 2025. Back in 1977 Schumacher had warned that replacing religion with science left a gaping hole in humanity that would only grow larger. And so, here we are…

📚 While I wasn’t looking, micro.blog implemented a feature that made sharing what’s in my antilibrary much easier than I thought: bookshelves can now be embedded in a page. So, here is what I am currently reading, and here is the pile for 2025, though at some point I should add the previous years.

A great one today from Chris Arnade, about Walking in Beijing. I will quote a few paragraphs but there is much much more:

To someone who has been raised on horror stories written in foreign papers, there is a surprising anything-goes attitude in China, outside of a few institutions. The internet firewall is annoying, but everyone gets around it, and everyone knows everyone does. Very bad things do happen in China, but the overwhelming majority of people also go about their daily lives much like anyplace else, focusing on daily tasks, local gossip, sports, family matters, career advancement, love lost and love wanted, rather than the political maneuverings of the political class. The Chinese are chill, fun, and open—at least about as much as you can be when living in a city with the aesthetic of an overly engineered corporate business park.

There is, when you look closer, a great deal of chaos in Beijing, some of which is simply about incompetence or a lack of care from the vast array of minor officials and bureaucrats, but most of it is from the surprisingly optimistic attitude of the residents. China doesn’t feel like an oppressive police state the way the Soviet bloc once did, because the Chinese, rather than being corrupted by anger, are sincere, thoughtful, grateful, happy, warm, efficient, genuine, and caring. To the degree that they are cynical (an attitude that dominates most oppressive authoritarian states) there is a playfulness to it, not a bitterness. An “Oh, did you see what silly thing the party did again?” rather than a sense of living through an existential terror.

So far so good. But:

Simply put, it’s unclear what China’s ultimate goal is beyond accumulating wealth and expanding its cities—eventually stretching its metro system to the 98th expressway ring, then the 400th—until the entire country fuses into a single vast urban sprawl. What is the end game? What is the Chinese guardian class working toward? Anyone who still believes it’s the old Marxist vision of eliminating capitalism and creating a classless, stateless society is deluding themselves.

[…]

I’m currently writing this in Korea, and the contrast between Beijing and Seoul is fascinating, mostly in an unflattering way to Beijing. Despite what I wrote above, I am happy to be out of Beijing and in Seoul. It is refreshing to be able to quickly read whatever I want and talk to whomever I want without having to jump through all sorts of hoops, regardless of how ineffective and symbolic they are.

Some good photos there too. Seems to be a place that’s better for living in than visiting — the anti-New York.

I appreciate a contrarian take, but this one from FT on European overregulation (the take — it’s not any worse than America) is just plain wrong. For example:

It’s not just Europe. The most recent “revolt” is explicitly premised on the claim that Europe has been falling behind US growth because it is more heavily regulated. But stop and think for a second: aren’t Americans complaining just as much about red tape? The US, too, is a master of throwing bureaucratic spanners in the wheels […]

In fact, those who measure such things find that the EU has more streamlined regulation than the US. Every five years, the OECD collects data on how competition-friendly its member states’ regulation is. Below is the 2023 vintage, for both the overall indicator and the sub-indicator “Administrative and regulatory burden”.

Pulling a lumbering bureaucracy’s stats sheet to show you’re not bureaucratic is a beautifully European thing to do. Never mind that the chart it shows are each individual country’s rules and regulations. The EU by itself has yet another set or rules, cast as a pall over any hope you may have that doing business in a member country will be smooth painless.