What am I up to now?
August, 2026
Contents
Updates
I’ve now spent two months on Google DeepMind’s AGI & Society team, thinking and writing about how AI affects poor countries. After the time in London, one month on either side of the summer solstice, I am back in San Francisco. I’ll also be in Washington, DC and New York for a week each later in the month. Please do reach out if you’d like to chat!
Reading
The trip to the east coast is partly to attend my aunt Paula’s retirement to-do from her post at WVU. This is my first time back in West Virginia in seven years, and I put some books on my reading list.
Ramp Hollow (2017) by Steven Stoll came highly recommended. It’s a history of the dispossession of Appalachia’s smallholders over the past centuries; the story of mountain households and their makeshift economy among the forest commons. It was the loss of this, from coal and timber industries imposing wage work and company towns, which Stoll argues brought the poverty which is now associated with Appalachia. The history is not always careful; he writes that West Virginia’s population has fallen 40% since 1950, when it was closer to 8%.
History books written in the past decade tend to be more polemical than older books claiming the same spots in the genre. Or, more likely, the polemics of past decades are dog whistles to my human ears and go unheard. I have nothing against polemics! How to Blow up a Pipeline is one of my favorite books, and it wears its disdain proudly. Ramp Hollow refuses to acknowledge its anger, and as a result the interesting historical observations are pressed through an ideological lens I found oppressive and uninteresting. Stoll is unwilling to concede any interesting point.
All of this is really too bad, because so much of this book was tailored to my interests. The final chapter is the only one not about Appalachia: it is about Mali. Stoll analogizes his research on land dispossession in Appalachia to contemporary land reforms in the Sahara.
Enclosure is not past but present, especially throughout Africa. Since 2008, corporations, governments, and international development agencies have looked anew at territory that agrarians have occupied for centuries without formal ownership. Private property doesn’t exist in most of the fifty-four countries on the continent.
This section was simply bad. After enumerating the World Bank’s goals in education, child mortality, eliminating AIDS, and after considering how the World Bank has provided agricultural productivity grants to communities of subsistence farmers, Stoll declines, on behalf of the farmers: “These are all admirable ends. But why does meeting a people’s basic human needs require that they shift to new ways of thinking?” I don’t believe that Stoll has any sense of what subsistence farming is; he spends pages on Sahlins’ “original affluent society” and Conklin’s critiques of the green revolution. He ends the book with an argument that the federal government should encourage Appalachians to return to subsistence farming: he proposes a federal law:
The United States shall create a series of commons communities, each designed to include a specified number of households within a larger landscape that will be managed by them, the residents. This landscape will provide the ecological base for hunting and gathering, cattle grazing, timber harvesting, vegetable gardening, and farming.
In this, he is my enemy. Moving people out of agriculture is a good thing. They become healthier and happier. Fewer of their children die and more of them go to schools. Moving people out of subsistence agriculture is a very good thing. I am a liberal, and I want the people of Mali and West Virginia to be able to live the lives they choose. But I also do not want Steven Stoll to prescribe them lives of harmful stasis.
Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia was far more my brand of polemic. The association of Appalachia with the opioid crisis, Trump’s 2016 election, and Hillbilly Elegy, she argues, is distracting from the true character and problems of the region. The wave of “Trump country” stories about West Virginian and Kentuckian hill counties was simplistic and degrading: these “pieces share a willingness to use flawed representations of Appalachia to shore up narratives of an extreme ‘other America’ that can be condemned or redeemed to suit one’s purpose.” The most egregious omission, she argues, is that of non-white Appalachia, and in this, she is most animated in her critique of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy:
If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles, then we should ask a number of questions. Where were the ‘Bernie Country’ pieces about Appalachia? There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election? I associate contemporary eastern Kentucky with grassroots prison abolition, so where were the essays about how a presumed Trump victory would imperil that work? West Virginia has the highest concentration of transgender teenagers in the country, so why didn’t anyone examine this facet of ‘Trump Country’ and how the election might reverberate in their lives?
Both Stoll and Catte have a fundamentally negative view of Appalachian history: in Stoll’s telling, it is a history of dispossession; in Catte’s, the shortcoming is that Black Appalachians are not featured more prominently. They disagree about much else, everything except the shape of the story: the region is acted upon, never acting. Although land and narratives are repossessed, no one is building churches or unions. I finished these books knowing very little about what the West Virginians did.
My two favorite books on the state have been Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre — the use of funky Appalachian place names as hooks will never die — and West Virginia: A History, a very competent overview by John Alexander Williams. Mud Lick is a journalistic account of the opioid epidemic in Mingo County, on the Kentucky line, following the death of Bull Preece and the resulting investigations and lawsuits, championed by Preece’s family. These lawsuits, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, targeted doctors, pharmacies, and drug distributors for keeping West Virginians hooked on painkillers. The characters are vivid and active, and occasionally sympathetic.
Among people talking about and working on the future of AGI, I frequently hear about the possible imminence and immanence of material abundance and post-scarcity. My concerns and confusions about this topic are largely psychological and economic: what would it mean to truly push the prices of goods and services to zero? could our demand truly be satiated? But one interjection into these conversations which has become increasingly prominent and decreasingly interesting is that there are still millions starving in America, that 47 million Americans, 13.5% of households, are food insecure.
This is not true, and the claims are a cruel distraction. Food insecurity is defined so loosely as to be meaningless; if you skip McDonald’s and eat carrots from home because a McDouble’s gone up to $4.69, you would be labeled food insecure.Example wording: “In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?” My own polemic is this: there is no hunger or malnutrition caused by low incomes in America today, and claiming otherwise sells short the war on poverty that defeated hunger. Our hungry, including in Appalachia, are a symptom of social and political problems, not economic. Legalizing gambling had a massive effect on hunger, creating almost 300,000 food-insufficient households across just 9 states earlier this decade.This effect is cyclical, strongest during the NFL season. Differences in the unemployment rate across time and place simply do not have this effect.I’m smuggling a lot into this argument. I do believe the strong version of this claim: there is no economic-caused hunger in America.
Could we call Mud Lick post-scarce? The men and women who lived there could and often did live without work, they had access to the most advanced medical system on the planet, and they were as wireheaded as modernity allows.
Jan Morris is my favorite travel writer. The primary flaw in her work is that it’s very invested in time, as well as place, and the oeuvre being >30 years old means that I will not be able to experience the cities she wrote about in Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (1997), Sydney (1992), or A Passage through New York (1969). Her books about timeless places, however, endure. Her Oxford (1965) is my favorite portrait of the city, and Venice (1960) is one of two books which has excited me about an Italian vacation. As the only journalist on the 1953 Everest expedition, her Coronation Everest (1958) is tremendous, and Nepal has also not changed, although the high Himalaya are fast going the way of Hong Kong or Sydney, rather than the perpetually amberized Oxford or Venice.
What made Morris powerful was her magical love of talking to people. Her books have many anecdotes which are surely falseIn Oxford, she repeats the apocryphal story of a skeleton-filled punt stuck in the Trill Mill. but when they were relayed to her with such truthfulness who could care. In her collection Contact! (2009), she pulled her favorite passages about people she had met from across her books.
On the Bund in Shanghai one evening a youth with the droopy shadow of a moustache confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through his examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had been pestered by students all afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,’ said I. ‘I won’t.’
At that a theatrical scowl crossed his face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked then, with that suggestion of whiskers around his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless and, ah yes, I thought, if the Gang of Four were still around, you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck and a mob to jeer me, not to consult me about participles.
But my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all.
It’s 200 pages of this, 297 excerpts from her books, and the last of her travel books before she settled down to rest in Wales.
Links
Maciej Cegłowski is the first blogger I ever called my “favorite”. That was fifteen years ago, and he was writing about traveling in Argentina, the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, and scurvy. After an almost-silent 6 years, he now has a substack about the economics of space exploration. Very up my alley!
There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket.
For one, there’s the matter of launching any of this into space. Unless you start nuking Florida from ground level (and I’m not saying ‘no’), you need dozens of traditional rockets to lift this affront to God and Nature into orbit. Even then, its fission products will get caught in the Earth’s magnetic field and eventually spiral their way back home.
But probably the biggest drawback of nuclear pulse propulsion is the thousands of nuclear bombs.
This is the first thing I’ve read which makes me want to try diving.
Just like in a forest, the real magic happens once you go inside of it, once you dive. If you are deep in the water itself, you are past the scattering, so the water and the plankton can repeatedly filter the light to their combined spectral peak before it arrives at your depth.
You can fill nearly the whole gamut this way, but the BBC can’t show it to you on Blue Planet. It is more vivid than video can capture. Underwater photographers often use filters to block out blues, so that the whole scene doesn’t just clip against the limits of their sensor. These intensities of blues and greens are mostly unknown to the surface world, and beyond what we even have language to describe.
I saw a new color a couple months ago, a particular green of sunlight layered through maple leaves on redwood bark. It was very shocking. I’ll keep an eye out for this author’s blue-green whale:
In all of my hunting, there was one region of the colorspace I was never able to fill with a naturally occurring color, my blue-green white whale. From what I’ve been able to find, no natural process emits 520 nm light at sufficient purity to make it close to the very top of the colorspace. Bioluminescent fungus peaks at around that wavelength, but the mixture of other wavelengths it emits causes its color to register far below.
I’ve taken to William O’Connor’s travel blog, including for recommendations in London, DC, and Addis Ababa.
Hallways are the underwear of hotel design. You’ve got to get through them to get what you want. Often, you hardly notice them. Sometimes they’re grim. But once in a while, they get you excited about what’s coming after.
We have identified a Maya mathematician by name.
There’s a park in Dalston, near where we were staying in London this summer, where the toads were very talkative. One of my favorite Orwell pieces is about the toads of London.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N. 1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
I had heard that there are only 41 theaters showing The Odyssey in the large-scale IMAX format in which it was filmed. But I didn’t know that this was up from 30 theaters, just because of the demand.
[Imax] spent more than a year before this release hunting projectors in decommissioned museum theaters, cannibalizing some for parts and rebuilding the rest, which is how the network grew from 30 rooms to 41 for The Odyssey.
Here are 24 fun facts about industrial robotics!
I remain confused about the effects of AlphaFold. It seems correct to have expected a large speed-up in biological and drug discoveries, yet we’ve seen very little. I saw this paper presented at Berkeley a few months back; they found a reallocation of effort but not a noticeable speedup. Something that the authors discussed which isn’t in this version is that they do not observe a change in training PhD students in experimental structural biology, or how they publish. Another paper presented last week also found reallocation. A team at DeepMind is somewhat more optimistic about the effect on total output.
David Oks has generally been worth reading, but I have been getting Gell-Mann’d more and more frequently. First it was his article about kinship ties in West Africa relying on a largely discredited literature, now it’s an essay about ambulance billing; both are deep fascinations of mine from my times in West Africa and ambulances. The ambulance essay is rather confused about the difference between 911 response, nonemergency transport, and interfacility transfers, which all have very different economics. David’s preferred model for emergency services is “ambulance insurance”, which has obvious adverse selection and low-acuity usage costs. My preferred model would be funding readiness through property taxes and charging per ride at marginal cost… which is already how American integrated EMS-Fire services operate. Of course, the actual problem with (urban) American EMS is the fire unions.
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