What am I up to now?
January, 2026
Contents
Updates
Happy new year! This month, I’ll be starting my official visit at Berkeley. While here, I’ll be working on my usual projects (taxation and reciprocity in African governments, AI use among the very poor, technology adoption by bureaucrats in poor countries). I’m also consulting with NGOs, governments, and research organizations on similar topics. I won’t be travelling much for the next few months. If you’re passing through San Fracisco, please say hi!
In the next few weeks, I’ll be putting out some writing on my favorite old-timey maps of San Francisco, my contribution to the vibecession debate, some links to writing I’ve done for consulting work, and some longer book reviews. Thanks for reading!
Reading
Here is the list of books I read in 2025. I am fairly happy with my reading this year. The most interesting reading project was Caro’s LBJ series, which took up most of my July. The first book, about Johnson’s childhood and early life, is the deepest and the most beautiful. The third book, Master of the Senate, was my favorite and the most generally interesting. This period is understudied relative to Johnson’s time as VP and president, and Caro gets to flex his research networking muscles the most. Johnson and Caro are most alike in this volume.
In fiction, the winners were Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, A Man of the People by Chiune Achebe, and The City & the City by China Miéville. My favorite book of the year was Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala.
In making the list, I looked back at my list from 2024. I have a good memory for what I read, but I’m often surprised by which books I end up talking and thinking about. Some of my favorite books from 2024 I never thought about since making that list: The Man Who Rode the Thunder by William Rankin or Here by Richard McGuire. Some others were sleepers, books I thought little of at the time but have come up repeatedly in the past two years:
Dominion, Matthew Scully. I’ve been recommending this book a lot as effective altruist circles have become less vegetarian and vegan, especially in the Bay Area. Scully was G.W. Bush’s speechwriter, and approaches animal welfare from untraditional angles.
William Blake, G.K. Chesterton. Both Chesterton and Blake have been on my mind recently. Without being certain who is whom, I want the Chesterton of today to write about the Blake of today. The catholic contrarian on the mystic.
Sperm Whales, Hal Whitehead. Whales are really cool and I think about them often.
Links
An appreciation of bureaucrats in very poor countries, in the style of an EA job recommendation. These are important and high-leverage jobs, and anyone can do a lot of good in these roles. I’ve worked with a lot of this type of person and admire them greatly.
This is a good, somewhat academic essay on Alice Munro’s legacy. I recommend it to anyone who has ever loved a Munro short story, or hated a news story about her.
Why are the Mormons so libertarian? This piece argues that theological doctrine first and a history of persecution second push Mormons toward limited government and a love of liberty. I entirely agree with the arguments. I wish there had been more focus on how these factors enable and support high-trust communities, which enable strong libertarianism.
This essay is about Tom Cruise and Michael Polanyi. I find most interpretations of Tom Cruise fascinating; this one focuses on his motive nature.
This is a game review for a card game. In the game, you play senior Nazi officials orchestrating the Holocaust. Maybe my favorite essay of the month; maybe my favorite usage of the Book of Job. I have loved the Greenstein translation.
Why did this game have such an impact on me? I’m still trying to decide. The immediacy of play, perhaps, or the magic circle showing its cracks. But I’ve visited the camps. Read the books and watched the movies. And this was the closest the blade has come to touching bone.
I paid $9 for this article.
It’s been a while since I last spent time in bus stations. This was a nice short piece about what they’re like today.
‘Perhaps the most baffling , though, was the common Kestrel. He was known simply as the Windfucker.”
This short story is a take on One Punch Man. The story doesn’t require familiarity with the source material, and it’s very funny.
I finally got around to reading The Mysteries, the only project released by Bill Watterson since the end of Calvin and Hobbes. This video on the making takes longer to watch than reading the book.
This is a dry, straightforward article about an averted terrorist attack at a hospital in Leeds. However, it’s an amazing and beautiful story. Part of me wishes it was given to a strong journalist, but I think that I love this version better.
I’ve been loving this blog called “Computers are Bad”; this post on the history and science of speedreading was excellent. Even the bit about AI at the end didn’t annoy me.
The funny thing about speed reading is that it has never been that credible. Evelyn Wood’s theories were inconsistent with the research and, frankly, a bit “out there” even as she developed them into a business in the 1960s. Experiments on speed reading, some of them conducted by the same people selling courses, have always shown iffy to clearly negative results. And yet speed reading has, in its good times, enjoyed a level of credibility and popularity that seems out of step with even its promises and certainly with its outcomes.
This is the best AI project I’ve seen recently: LLMs trained on data ONLY up to certain dates: 1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946. This uses a curated dataset of time-stamped text. The models aren’t useful for many predictable reasons – but they are very cool, and I want more like this.
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviews Santa Claus.
Previously
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