What am I up to now?
August, 2025
Contents
Updates
I spent all of July in the Bay Area, staying in Berkeley with my wonderful girlfriend. I’m new to the idea of California, and Berkeley feels more Californian than San Franciscan. Unlike the City, Berkeley is sunny every day. The people walk slower, and fewer of them wear headphones. And like the rest of California, Berkeley feels in a world apart from the world. Friends have visited from New York, DC, London, Hangzhou: they all report it’s hell out there. It’s 94° in Manhattan, plus all the humidity. London is empty in July. The Bay Area is in its own dynamic stasis.
My favorite part of the Bay remains Marin. I go to the Mill Valley Public Library to write; I can see a congregation of 70 redwoods out the window. The light is different under redwoods, and when you get above them, out of the Mill Valleys and Nicasio Valleys and Tamalpais Valleys, the grass in July is yellow and the old oaks provide shade and roots to read on.
I’ll have lots more time to explore; I’ll be spending the fourth year of my PhD at UC Berkeley. MWG and I are apartment hunting in the Mission. This is my first real exposure to the American rental market, and I was just too slow to secure our favorite place, a flat in the shallow Mission rented out by an econometrician at Meta. There’s a highly eclectic selection, things feel less standardized than in DC or NY. I’m confident we’ll find something great (but I’m open to leads!).
I’m at the end of a grant-writing binge. JB and I have applied to three grants in the past month for our project on LLMs-over-SMS in Sierra Leone, and I’m very glad that this has come to a close. There are other projects and big ideas which I’ve been putting off too long; the digitization project in Gambia has pieces rusty from neglect, and there are blog posts about the neolithic and AI exposure and sovereign debt to write.
I’ll be at the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford for the second half of August, for Phil Trammell and Zach Mazlish’s course. I’d love to catch up with any of my friends in the South Bay, and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone else at the course.
Reading
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro
Why read 3,500 pages about LBJ? Because it’s by Robert Caro.
I’ve read great biographies of Churchill, Genghis Khan, Winnie and Nelson Mandela, and Queen Elizabeth II recently. None of these gave me a sense of what it would be like to be in a room with these people, to speak to them, to argue with them. Caro never spoke with LBJ, but he goes SO deep into Johnson’s social circles and archives, interviews for tens of thousands of hours; in Johnson’s own refrain which Caro repeats throughout all four volumes: “If you do everything, you’ll win.” The outcome is as intimate a portrait of a man as a biographer can create.
Caro doesn’t just do this for LBJ. He does it for his world, the years of LBJ. Sam Rayburn, the longest serving Speaker of the House in history, gets a full biographical treatment from Caro. He provides a 100 page biography of JFK, because there’s no way to understand LBJ’s conundrum from 1961 to November 22nd, 1963 without understanding Jack; there’s even more detail on Bobby, because there’s no way to understand LBJ’s misery and their mutual hatred without understanding what shaped the younger Kennedy. Coke Stevenson, who Johnson defeated in the 1948 Texas Senate race, gets hundreds of Johnson-less pages.Misha Saul has fun posts on Caro’s JFK and Stevenson sections. Even if Caro didn’t interview about and research these subjects with the same depth as he did LBJ, there’s still a spark of insight into their characters.
The most common question I got after finishing these books was whether LBJ could exist today. The specific conditions which enabled LBJ to rise in the Senate and be effective in the legislature (mainly, a Democratic party split on civil rights) are gone. Someone with the same characteristics – the extreme endurance, shamelessness, and desperation; the ability to read people, to fundraise, and to persuade in backrooms – could be quite powerful. But many of the levers LBJ relied upon are gone, and I don’t know what their replacements are.
The other question I get is, “Who would you like a Caro-depth biography of?” Dwarkesh suggested Caro himself; of my list above, some are difficult (e.g., the Queen’s or Mandela’s confidants would never open up). Caro’s real skill is opening up a portal to another world. Maybe Johnson couldn’t exist today; he would feel other in today’s Washington, DC. Caro brought something alien to life. That’s what I would like to see again.
I wanted to ease back into non-Caro writing. From the past week:
The City and the City (Miéville)
Not science fiction, but weird fiction. A murder mystery, not a usual genre for me, and a very unusual setting. I liked being dropped into an unexplained setting and figuring it out as we go along.
The Paper Menagerie (Liu)
A collection of short stories from a decade+ of writing. The title story is the standout, and many of the others fell into the “too cute” category. Liu’s twists are more often about the main character’s specialness (“Mono no aware”, “The man who ended history”), feeling contrived. The stories where the setting does the work (“The bookmaking habits of select species”, “A brief history of the trans-pacific tunnel”) are stronger.
On the Fireline (Desmond)
Recommended by my sister, who enjoyed some of Desmond’s more recent work. I love niche ethnographies; this is the author as a grad student, writing about his days fighting wildfires in Arizona. Desmond is so clearly an academic writing in the 2000s (the writing most reminded me of Mark Fisher, oddly enough).
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (King and Eveley)
I’ve never been a comic book guy. When I stayed home sick from school, my dad would bring me the lastest copy of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or what-have-you. I don’t know what brought me to pick this one up. The art was wonderful; the story was a True Grit rip-off, but I love True Grit, so I loved it.
Portfolios of the Poor (Collins et al.)
I don’t often write about books I read for work here, because I don’t read those books in the same way I read books for “fun”. Portfolios of the Poor is different; a data-heavy version of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The authors collected detailed financial diaries from hundreds of families living under $2 per day in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa. The microcredit cheerleading is outdated. The narrative and descriptives were great.
Links
Borges speaking at the Univeristy of Minnesota in 1976; the best (only?) video of him speaking in English I’ve seen. Gosh he’s funny for an old man. Transcript here doesn’t do it justice; how much has been lost?
The Unabomber offers a fable about coalitions and prioritization.
“These issues are not petty and trivial. Kicking the dog is cruel and brutal and it is humiliating to be called a fruit. But in comparison to our real problem — in comparison to the fact that the ship is still heading north — your grievances are petty and trivial, because if we don’t get this ship turned around soon, we’re all going to drown.”
“Fascist!” said the professor.
“Counterrevolutionary!” said the lady passenger. And all of the passengers and crew chimed in one after another, calling the cabin boy a fascist and a counterrevolutionary. They pushed him away and went back to grumbling about wages, and about blankets for women, and about the right to suck cocks, and about how the dog was treated. The ship kept sailing north, and after a while it was crushed between two icebergs and everyone drowned.
The best genre of SMBC is “Zach Weinersmith found a quote and wants to share it but the main way people interact with Zach Weinersmith’s content is comics so Zach Weinersmith has to make a comic using this quote.” Most recent example here, Wayne Gretzky.
A history of technology on Alcatraz.
Bush on PEPFAR :
The aides crafted a plan in secret, keeping it even from Colin Powell and Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. They were ready for a final presentation to Bush on December 4. Just before heading into the meeting, Bush stopped by the Roosevelt Room to visit with Jewish leaders in town for the annual White House Hanukkah party later that day. The visitors were supportive of Bush’s confrontation with Iraq and showered him with praise. One of them, George Klein, founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition, recalled that his father had been among the Jewish leaders who tried to get Franklin Roosevelt to do more to stop the Holocaust. “I speak for everyone in this room when I say that if you had been president in the forties, there could have been millions of Jews saved,” the younger Klein said.
Bush choked up at the thought—“You could see his eyes well up,” Klein remembered—and went straight from that meeting to the AIDS meeting, the words ringing in his ears. Lefkowitz, who walked with the president from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, was convinced that sense of moral imperative emboldened Bush as he listened to the arguments about what had shaped up as a $15 billion, five-year program.
Freddie DeBoer is my guilty pleasure substack; I don’t subscribe, but I do often read. His recent “scouting reports” on contemporary writers was the best post he’s put out in years; I’ve read a lot of new writers because of it. Two of my favorite writers are reviewed back-to-back:
Kriss, Sam A circus barking pomo anthropologist, Nintendo Nietzsche, standing just outside of the action, speaking as fast as a auctioneer but still somehow laconic and unimpressed. The essayist as amphetamine-psychotic dungeon master, issuing declarations from his fever bed, spinning orphic, fire-drenched polemics out of Hegelian fog and cursed memes. Rants in the form of a fake 19th century report from a syphilitic colonial ethnographer hiding in society’s bushes with a pith helmet. British, but nobody’s perfect. Clearly thinks he’s the smartest guy in the underground; just might be. Reliance on the cryptic is enough of a crutch that there’s perpetually a touch of self-parody, but when he draws the bath the temperature is always right. Few contemporary stylists are more thrilling to read. More than anyone else here, has only one pitch, one speed. But he throws gas, and the fact that he knows it somehow makes him more endearing.
Levine, Matthew
Writes about high finance like it’s a particularly ridiculous branch of experimental theater; he’s the only one who gets the joke, but he’s too preternaturally self-effacing to make you feel dumb about it. Fits in very well with the great tradition of Jewish American prose stylists but would probably dismiss such talk as pretentious. Has perfected a tone that combines deep technical fluency with a kind of existential bemusement, as if he can’t believe the system is still running but is happy to explain it until it breaks. Columns are dense, discursive, and often hilarious, full of footnotes, deadpan hypotheticals, and lawyerly sleight-of-hand. Trusts no institution but finds them all fascinating anyway. Style can become a tic; not every absurdity needs six metaphors and a pretend email from a fake compliance officer. But always an instinctually gifted teacher. There is really no reason at all that he should be as good at this as he is.
George Saunders recommends short stories to aliens. I had never read the Raymond Carver recommended here; amazing. I’ve long loved that Lahiri, Hemingway, and Tolstoy.
The journal Nature publishes a short story ever issue, called “Futures”. I had never come across these before; here’s a relevant one from 2003.
Previously
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