What am I up to now?
February, 2026
Contents
Updates
In February, I’ll be in Berkeley three days per week and otherwise working from San Francisco. I’ll also be at EAG San Francisco the weekend of February 14th. If you’re passing through or want to chat, please say hi!
I’m working from the Berkeley economics department on the usual topics. Our most recent round of data collection in Gambia has wrapped up neatly, as has a survey in Addis Ababa. I’m excited about both of these projects moving forward.
In other work news, Schmidt Sciences just announced their funding for my and Johanna’s partnership with Africell, to study how their users are using LLMs without internet access. I’ll be back in Sierra Leone this spring, and we’ll launch a survey soon. If there any questions you would be interested in asking very poor Sierra Leoneans who use AI, get in touch.
Reading
Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, Ted Cohen. Cohen was the longest-standing moderator of the Latke-Hamantash debate at the University of Chicago, the debate’s first venue, so he’s eminently qualified philosopher to write this book. He considers questions of explaining jokes, what it means to “get” a joke, why we joke about death so much, and the social purpose of jokes. He really loved making people laugh; the footnotes are mostly about how the audience reacted to each of his jokes.
Cohen also spends a lot of text on jokes stereotyping specific populations: the Poles, mathematicians, black people, people with Alzheimer’s, the Jews. He gives examples of all of these, but his own disposition means the majority and the best are about the Jews. Here’s my favorite:
A group of Jews decided to take up competitive rowing, and so they formed a crew and began practicing. Months later they had competed several times, and always they not only lost, but came in so far behindthat they thought something must be wrong with their approach. They sent one of their number off to England to observe the Oxford/Cambridge race, and then to the Ivy League to see the rowers there. When he returned, he was asked if indeed these other crews hada different technique.
“Well,” he reported, “They have one guy yelling, and eight guys rowing.”
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen. I had only previously read Persuasion, so Austen being funny was a great surprise!
Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford. It takes its alternate-history premise (the large Native American city of Cahokia in modern day Illinois survives up to the 1920s) seriously. The underlying noir mystery is less interesting than the alternate history, and I most enjoyed the historical documents interspersed as epigraphs.
The Museum of Other People, Adam Kuper. The first half is a history of European anthropological museums, and very full of fun debates between crusty historians and ethnographers. The second half gets into modern debates about repatriation and display. Kuper is critical of recent trends, although he does agree with my mother than the National Museum of the American Indian has a great cafeteria.
Links
Yiyun Li remembers Edmund White , famous writer of LGBTQ fiction and non, in the Yale Review. Largely about bookclubs, suicide, and loss.
A review of I Just Want This Done by Raiford Dalton Palmer, apparently the best book about getting a divorce. Lots on principal-agent problems and mechanism design.
Defector’s annual report on what Americans got stuck in their rectums last year.
My favorite annual book post: Biblioklept’s best books of 1976. Of his top picks, I’ve only read the first two, the Engel and the García Márquez. The disconnect between bestseller lists (Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal) and what actually lasted is as wide as you’d expect.
Don Taylor, a Duke professor, analyzes Duke’s financial structure.
Duke university is a hedge fund with a health system, a huge research enterprise & a hobby of college.
Interesting talk notes from economist Eric Budish to the FTC on how to fix the market for event tickets.
An Olympic gold medalist rower writes about his supplement stack. He has a strong epistemology, perhaps too strong. He argues that repeating a nearly identical training routine for five-plus years, 300 days a year, gives you body awareness precise enough to detect subtle effects of supplements that wouldn’t show up in studies.
This essay about a mother who consistently chose to help people who would never be able to repay her is beautiful and sad.
I don’t know how to introduce this interview with Karen Greenlee, a real-life necrophiliac who worked in funeral homes in the late 1970s.
When you’re on top of a body it tends to purge blood out of its mouth, while you’re making passionate love .. You’d have to be there, I guess.
I Was Kidnapped by Idiots is a great title for a piece about being kidnapped by idiots.
Even Greenland by Barry Hannah. Two fighter pilots in a burning F-14, philosophizing about experience and authenticity on the way down. A perfect short story.
Friend of the blog Nate Fairbanks on the Army’s AI talent pipeline and how it harms the careers of the officers it’s supposed to develop.
Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy is a short story in the White Review written as a medical FAQ by a neurosurgeon who is falling apart.
In the style of Wirecutter, the best gas masks.
Previously
…