Reading
December ‘24
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut
“We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
Limitarianism, Ingrid Robeyns
“Did I work especially hard? Maybe a little, sometimes. Most of my work involved sitting in an office reading and writing emails and talking on the phone. Did I work harder than the guy who had to connect the hoses to the fire hydrant in the snow or the woman who had to smile while schlepping pitchers of beer around all night? Not really.”
The Trial of Julian Assange, Nils Melzer
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Judgement at Tokyo, Gary J. Bass
The Oligarchs, David Hoffman
November ‘24
The Lumumba Plot, Stuart A. Reid
Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos
“For the Communist Party, the return of class presented an opportunity: the Party came to believe that co-opting those with property would buttress it against agitation toward democracy. Officials took to quoting the ancient sage Mencius, who said, ‘Those with a constant livelihood have a constant heart, those lacking a constant livelihood lack a constant heart.’ But relying on prosperity to ensure a ‘constant heart’ posed a problem that would grow into the Chinese Communist Party’s essential paradox. How would the heirs of Marx and Lenin, the rulers of the People’s Republic, who had risen to power denouncing bourgeois values and inequality, baldly embrace the new moneyed class? How could it retain its ideological claim to rule?”
On the Popularity of Clarkson’s Farm, Morgoth’s Review
“In our politically saturated media complex, with our attention spans dwindling under the algorithm's force, it is lovely to see people in wellies arguing over how to erect a fence post in mud. It reminds us of the before times; it is a crack in the superstructure illuminating the paucity of the world around us but also telling us that, more often than not, the answer to the cacophony of politics and narratives often lies in the mundane and relatable.”
October ‘24
Stop the Robot Apocalypse, Amia Srinivasan
Dylan Patel, Asianometry, and Dwarkesh Patel discussing the semiconductor industry
September ‘24
Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Industry and the Anxiety Aesthetic, Brendon Holder
“Industry is watchable because the creators understand how to balance the dread with moments of ecstasy, market crashes against orgasms, death coupled with drug highs. It isn’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes it’s a character stumbling upon her father’s hard-on but what’s consistent is the thrill. The irration - stemming from the immoral decisiosn of the show’s dizzying ensemble, their blitzing banter - and the feeling of being keyed up, sometimes literally as we watch the characters do cocaine bumps from keys in bathrooms, are all hallmarks of anxiety. The diagnosis might as well be a roadmap to how an episode of Industry is made.”
How “Industry” Made Prestige TV for the Tiktok Era, Kyle Chayka
“Industry’s first two seasons were headlong experiments in character, pacing, subplot, and audiovisual stimuli, sometimes extreme to the point of incomprehensibility. The third titrates the formula perfectly; as if to stimulate the characters’ habitual bumps of coke and ketamine, the plot jolts forward and shudders to a halt, to maximize the drama. It’s like the opposite of A.S.M.R., an indulgence for the Internet-torched attention span, offering stimulus at every turn.”
August ‘24
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
“I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.”
Ambition, then and now; Benn Stancil
“For years, you don’t just work somewhere; you are consumed by it. The things that matter to you are the things that matter to it. For better or for worse, it puts blinders on your ambitions: You obsess over success in your field, and wonder why people in other fields stress about the trivial status games in theirs.
And then…you don’t. Your calendar is cleared; your to-do list is zeroed. Your problems are suddenly someone else’s responsibility. You’re pulled from the water that you long ago forgot was water, and dropped directly onto the land.
Standing on the shore, your old pond—the pond where you did your life’s work, in which nothing seemed more important than being a big fish—suddenly looks like all the other ponds you used to care so little about. It looks distant; foreign, trivial. From that vantage point, you don’t mourn leaving it; you mourn having spent so much time there.”
Insomniac City, Bill Hayes
“I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is?
The other day, I was on a local 6 going uptown and seated next to a young woman with a baby in a stroller. At each stop, a man (always a man) would enter the car and end up standing right above us. I had my iPod on and was just watching. Inevitably, each man would make goofy faces and smile at the baby, and the baby would smile and make faces back. At each stop, the standing man would be replaced by a new one, straight out of central casting: First, an older Latin guy. Then he gets off and a young black man appears. Then a white man in a suit. Then a construction worker with a hard hat. Tough guys. New York guys. All devoted to one important task: making a baby smile.
I have other subway stories to tell. And I could list lots more reasons why I like riding the 1, 2, 3, C, F, D, 4, 5, or L. But if pressed, I’d have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back— whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the change, you might have done things differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward.”
Swimming in July, Henrik Karlsson
July ‘24
1984, George Orwell
“He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.”
The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt
“The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are apart and from whose elements you are made. There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which. you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully endure, for at least a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing—from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.”
“The Alexandrian library was not associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual property. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to assemble the accumulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge. Fantastic efforts were made not only to amass vast numbers of books but also to acquire or establish definitive editions. Alexandrian scholars were famously obsessed with the pursuit of textual accuracy. How was it possible to strip away the corruptions that inevitably seeped into books copied and recopied, for the most part by slaves, for centuries? Generations of dedicated scholars developed elaborate techniques of comparative analysis and painstaking commentary in pursuit of the master texts. They pursued as well access to the knowledge that lay beyond the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world.”
The Panama Papers; Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer
June ‘24
Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri
Ties looks coldly at the price of freedom and happiness. It both celebrates and castigates Dionysian states of ecstasy, of abandon. And though happiness often involves linking ourselves to other people—in other words, stepping outside the confines of ourselves— it is something, in the final analysis, that characters experience privately, alone.
In Starnone’s novel, life has to be reread in order to be fully experienced. Only when things are reread, reexamined, revisited, are they understood: letters, photos, words in dictionaries. Translation, too, is a processing of going back over things again and again, of scavenging and intuiting the meaning, in this case multivalent, of a text. The more I read this novel, the more I discovered.
Trust, Hernan Diaz
“[H]e viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that Benjamin never could have anticipated.”
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
“I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. St. Patrick’s Day. In the morning Times Square was filled with drunken teenagers in green baseball caps, and I walked right down to Tompkins Square Park to escape them. By the time I turned for home it had begun to snow. The streets were almost deserted. At the top of Broadway I passed a man sitting in a doorway. He must have been in his forties, with cropped hair and big cracked hands. When I paused he started to speak unstintingly, saying that he had been sitting there for three days, saying that not a single person had stopped to talk to to him. He told me about his kids — I got three beautiful babies on Long Island — and then a confusing story about work boots. He showed me a wound on his arm and said I got stabbed yesterday. I’m like a piece of shit here. People throw pennies at me.
It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? Easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger’s body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of coloured pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.”
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, Mark Doty
“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets. The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted, the bread broken; the oysters have been shucked, part of this great wheel of cheese cut away; the sealed chamber of the pie, held aloft on its raised silver stand, has been opened. Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of the plate, its handle jutting toward us; someone plans, in a moment to pick it up again. These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated. They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time.
But there’s the paradox—they are depicted in a moment of being seen, contemplated between the experience of tasting, smelling, devouring; but this depiction places them outside of time, or almost outside of it, in a long, slow process of decay, which is the process of oxidation, of slow chemical transformation, like the paint in Nellius’s medlar going cloudy under the influence of extruding crystals of arsenic. Whatever time may have done to the original fruits, their depiction is now safe from the quick corrosions of local time and subject to the larger, slower depredations of history.
And thus something of the imperfect, the quickly passing, the morning meal with its immediate pleasures has been imported into the realm of perfection, into the long, impersonal light of centuries.”
Research as leisure activity, Celine Nguyen
May ‘24
A Great Country, Shilpi Somaya Gowda
“The vastness of the Indian population made everything feel unachievable, like trying to scale the sheer wall of one of its urban skyscrapers with bare hands. Think of it—1.4 billion people—even if you only took the urban educated share, you were still talking about hundreds of millions of people. The upper strata of society—high-caste Brahmins, wealthy traders, the military and political elite—had dominated society for so long that their descendants had generations of wealth and privilege to draw upon. They owned the best homes, attended the best schools, won the best jobs, helped one another out, and the cycle repeated itself for their children.”
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson
Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism, Amelia Morgan
“Exhaustion itself is not new. The feeling of there being just too much to do and the pre-emptive exhaustion this is bound up with is tied necessarily to the unmooring of fixed and rigid roles and hierarchies of rank that characterise capitalist modernity. If we’re free to be or do anything we want, our failure to succeed can feel, especially in competitive and highly individualised societies, like our own fault. However, the feeling that we ought to be working all the time, and not just that we should be busy or that modernity is overly stimulating, seems to be particularly contemporary concern.”
“The theorist Mark Fisher argued that call centre workers, what he termed ‘banal cyborgs'‘, were the paradigmatic contemporary worker. For the estimated 1 million call centre workers in 5,000 UK call centres, the frontier of control between workers and managers is felt continuously. For call center workers, the possibility of a call being pulled up and getting you into into trouble is a very real one. Every encounter with a customer could feasibly be recalled at any moment.”
“‘I would prefer not to’ could refer to a particular act — in Bartleby’s case, I would prefer not to copy out a particular letter, or to engage in the kind of effort required to look after myself — or it could refer to all manner of particular or general refusals. This ambiguity allows for the disavowal of the routine misery of contemporary work, indeed of contemporary life, without positing an alternative. No wonder it has proved so popular — capitalism and its attendant cruelty is unpalatable, but alternatives remain beyond comprehension.”
'“The openness and ambiguity of My Year of Rest and Relaxation might be appealing to those who are simply too exhausted to know what they would rather be doing. Similarly, the privileged cruelty of the book’s main character is thrilling not only because it presents readers with the pleasure of second-hand transgression but because it strikes at the ways in which sociability is harnessed for profit.”
From the Mundane to the Divinely Gross, Anything Goes in this Novel; Dustin Illingworth
Solenoid, by the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, is an endlessly strange study of existence and the longing to escape it.
“‘Solenoid,’ too, is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleit’s cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of García Márquez and Bruno Schulz’s labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu’s anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature — ‘No novel ever gave us a path; all of them, absolutely all of them sink back into the useless void of literature’ — he also affirms the possible inherent in the ‘bitter and incomprehensible books’ he idolizes. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of ‘Solenoid’ itself.”
Why I Write, George Orwell
April ‘24
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins
“And then there was the ‘Third World’—everyone else, the vast majority of the world's population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world's downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the "Third Estate" during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. ‘Third’ did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.”
The World for Sale, Jack Farchy and Javier Blas
The Sister, Sung-Yoon Lee
Watching Monkey Man
March ‘24
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, Rana Dasgupta
The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s Gilded Age, James Crabtree
The Bandit Queens, Parini Shroff
“Karem’s voice rumbled near her, a balm: ‘I think when we’re kids, we just accept things. We don’t think to question until later, sometimes not even then.’”
February ‘24
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
‘“What is a game?” Marx said. “It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”’
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
“Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.”
Blood and Oil, Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Bad Kids, Zijin Chen
The Rainbow, Yasunari Kawabata
“Sometimes, I find myself thinking that none of our pains, none of our sins, are wholly original. They’re an inheritance, limitations of those who preceded us. Our traditions and customs are all inherited from the dead, don’t you think?”
Cloud Labs, The Guardian
Watching: Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Expats, and Poor Things
January ‘24
Underground, Haruki Murakami
All the Lovers in the Night, Mieko Kawakami
“As I passed below the haloes of the green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people—people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.”
December ‘23
In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park
Readme.txt, Chelsea Manning
“But when war is presented to the American public, it looks like a finished product: cleaned and edited, funneled through embedded reporters who have their own complicated relationships with the military to manage. Or it’s flashed briefly across CNN, simplified into the kind of takeaway you can fit across a chyron. In that fairy-tale version, there are only surgical strikes. Trucks—filled only with bad guys, because in this make-believe version where the bad guys are is always clear—are blown up clearly from the front of a cruise missile.”
A Geometry of Desire, John Ganz
Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman, Jia Tolentino
Found the Ginza Music Bar’s playlist, rewatching Manbiki Kazoku’s The Shoplifters (2018)
November ‘23
The Fund, Rob Copeland
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yōko Ogawa
“Root passed the qualifying exam to become a middle school teacher. Next spring, he'll begin teaching mathematics." I could hardly contain my pride as I made my announcement. The Professor sat up to hug Root, but his arms were frail and trembling. Root bent down to embrace him, the Enatsu card hanging between them.
The sky is dark, the spectators and the scoreboard are in shadow. Enatsu stands alone on the mound under the stadium lights. The windup. The pitch. Beneath the visor of his cap, his eyes follow the ball, willing it over the plate and into the catcher's mitt. It is the fastest one he has ever thrown. And I can just see the number on the back of his pin-striped uniform. The perfect number 28.”
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes agains the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.”
Strange Case of Dan Loeb and Daniel S. Loeb, KG and Dan Scott
He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal, Caroline Gutman
Inkbase: Programmable Ink, Joshua Horowitz
October ‘23
A Flat Place, Noreen Masud
“If I walked far enough, I thought, over those fields, out past the edges of my vision, soon the road and the car and my fighting sisters would vanish, and there would just be me. Standing in the middle of that flatness, running slowly, with. nothing to see on any side. Then, maybe, I could rest.”
“Since Freud, modern psychology has loved the concrete event: the idea that if we are depressed or disturbed, it’s because something specific happened, long ago. A landmark in our lives, a turning point, the moment of trauma. Those memories might be repressed but can and must be fished out eventually. But not all lives are shaped by the definite peaks of event. Some lives seem utterly flat and undramatic, and yet something electric runs over their surface, holding the gaze. Some lives like my own.
A flat place helps us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘happen’ and to rethink what it means for something to ‘matter.’ To accept that not all discoveries involve digging for answers, or ascending heights—that sometimes it’s just a case of staying, quietly and steadily, with what you already know, and have always known.”
On the penultimate episode of Billions (Axe Global; Season 7, Episode 11):
“Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.
We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.”
September ‘23
Eat a Peach, David Chang
“I definitely wasn’t thinking about it back then, but I’ve since come to understand Momofuku through a book I read in college. I’ll spare you too much of my amateur philosophical analysis, but here’s the top line of what Friedrich Nietzsche is saying in The Birth of Tragedy: all great art is based on the coupling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian represents order, beauty, truth, perfection. In culinary terms, it’s a tasting menu. The Dionysian is the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the extremes of ecstasy and suffering. More like a pig roast or crawfish boil. You don’t fully appreciate one without the other. Order is beautiful because of the underlying chaos in the world. Conversely, works of a wild and unexpected nature are awe-inspiring or tragic or moving because they defy our sense of order. A moment of messy, porky joy like the one at Seiōbo is only meaningful because it’s happening at the end of a linear tasting menu at a casino restaurant. We are trying to show you both the Apollonian and the Dionysian at the same time.”
Stay True, Hua Hsu
The Latecomer, Jean Hanff Korelitz
To My Parents, Benn Stancil
The luxurious fantasy of suffering in Hanya Yanagihara’s novels, Constance Grady
“In interviews, Yanagihara has described her central theme as the duality between dull, enervating safety and flamboyant, enervating danger. Her books are designed to play these two poles against each other, and to make the case for danger over safety — for, as she sometimes seems to put it, the pleasure of life over life itself.”
On Reading More, Alex Ker
“Used bookstores are curated by the tastes, aesthetics, and curiosities of the staff and local culture—the zeitgeist of the current epoch and of a bygone era—not simply the popular titles appealing to the masses. They reflect a kind of collective intellect of a group of people—maybe a group with mental frameworks you wish to emulate . . . My favourite are Free Libraries: wooden boxes where people can donate and take free books. They function like hyper-localized-neighbourhood-hive-minds; perusing titles is not far from the peering into the personality and quiddity of a region.”