What am I up to now?
September, 2026
Contents
Updates
I went on a run in San Francisco today, and it smelled like autumn. It smelled like leaves beginning to decay and damp soil and woodsmoke.It’s the Mission, so who’s to say what was burning. These are smells I associate with West Virginia in late November, where we spent every Thanksgiving of my childhood. The seasons are flatter and earlier out here.
I was back in West Virginia in early August, for the first time in seven years, and it was decidedly unautumnal. My aunt’s retirement party was humid and sweaty and wonderful. My mom wrote us a play to perform in Aunt Paula’s honor, and there were so many West Virginia pepperoni rolls that I was still finding them in my backpack and suitcase a week later.
We spent the next week in DC. I visited DIME at the World Bank and talked about how to design experiments on the effects of AI in poor countries; I saw colleagues and friends at CG, CGD, and GD. My buddy Sam moved from NYC to Baltimore and we helped build some furniture. It was a wonderful trip home.
I also have a few new pieces out. First, a piece with Karthik Tadepalli and Oliver Kim on global inequality in a world of transformative AI. Second, a post on VoxDev with multiple friends about the need for novel experiments using AI in poor countries. I also previously neglected to link to this post from last month on Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” which many people continue to misread and abuse.
I’ll likely be in SF for the rest of the month, and we’ll be hosting various events. Please do reach out if you’d like to meet!
Reading
A Month in the Country
I loved A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr. It’s a short, quiet novel set in rural Yorkshire in 1920; glorious passages of prose, deep, religious, painful, and so very relatable, whether or not you were at Passchendaele. It’s about the end of summer, and the beginning of autumn, and how we learn to be melancholy at that time.
The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.
The narrator is a WWI veteran uncovering a fourteenth-century Judgement wall-painting over the chancel arch of the village church to fulfill the desire of a recently deceased village notable. Also around are an archaeologist digging for the notable’s excommunicated ancestor, the grumpy village vicar, his beautiful wife, and many more small town Yorkies. It’s just one month, and quite idyllic.
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
The frame narrative is quite strong: him looking back from fifty years later, when the memories have turned into something of their own. I suspect Carr is very good at this. I’m looking forward to A Season in Sinji, about a cricket game on an RAF base in Sierra Leone during WWII where Carr served, for this reason, hopefully before my next trip to Freetown. Here’s a short biography.
At another interview, he was asked if there was any insanity in the family (these were different times) and replied: ‘I have a sister’.
Arabia Felix
Arabia Felix (1962) by Thorkild Hansen, about the 1760s Danish expedition to Yemen, the first European expedition to Arabia, is an elegiac, wintry, end-of-a-world book.
So on the ship on which guns are being got ready for their murderous debate, a man is completely absorbed in observing the path of Venus.
The story is about Carsten Niebuhr, the only survivor of the six-man expedition, as the rest fall around him, mostly of malaria. Niebuhr was the expedition’s cartographer and astronomer, the youngest man on the expedition, and the least proud. He also seems to have been the best chosen, given the wealth of what he returned with, though he never left Scandinavia again. He spent the rest of his life taking measures with his astrolabe from the villages around his home, able to walk a town for an hour and then describe every house in immaculate detail. Niebuhr wasn’t blind until fifty years later. While much of what Hansen bases his book upon is from the letters of the expedition members, some letters from their deathbeds, the clearest portraits of Niebuhr come from his son.
And then he told us that when he lay blind on his bed, all the pictures of the Orient appeared quite clearly to his inner eye; so there was nothing remarkable about his being able to talk about them as if they were something he had seen the day before. Similarly, the vast dome of the Asian night sky with its myriads of stars extended above him as he lay quite still; and this was his greatest delight.
The story is also about the philologist von Haven, the most prominent academic on the expedition, who bought arsenic from a Constantinople chemist to keep the rest in line. von Haven was a desperate man, resentful of the status inversion on an expedition of equals, and he not being first.If any, it was Niebuhr, who was the treasurer of the expedition. von Haven was the first to die, and I think he expected that he would never die, that he was protected, as he had been so privileged and lucky.
With an 83% mortality rate, it’s clear that something didn’t go right. Hansen illustrates a few opportunities the expedition had to save themselves, including after the first two professors died. The remaining travelers could choose to push on to Sana’a in the summer mountains, or return to the coast and wait for the trade winds to bring European ships. Today, it’s obvious they should have gone to the mountains; that’s where the nomads were going anyway. But they had no idea how malaria worked. Niebuhr, the healthiest remaining, chose the coast, dooming the rest of the expedition. I admire his self-authorization, his ability to step up when his seniors had died so recently, knowing he is not a replacement as powerful as the recently deceased.
Forsskål, the expedition’s botanist, is strangely faint in the book, which is an output of how it is written and of Forsskål’s own personality and paranoia: most of his notes were in code, and have never been deciphered. A Swede on a Danish expedition, he was loyal to his mentor Linnaeus and their country, seeking to keep his discoveries from the funders. After his death Linnaeus wrote to the astronomer Wargentin, “Yesterday I received a letter from Forsskål, from the realm of the dead. . .”The delay on letters from Arabia to Scandinavia, sometimes more than two years, creates an odd sense of time travel for those following the expedition from home. Linnaeus named a plant for him, and gave it an appropriate description.
The four famous descriptive terms, tenacissima, hispida, adhaerens and uncinata mean stubborn, wild, obstinate and angular. The one living memory of Peter Forsskål is the plant Forsskalea, a stinging nettle.
Hansen’s archival discipline, as well as his own ability to turn a phrase and the pellucid translation, bought him novelistic liberties. But the characters and their story, of death, deception, discovery, are what carried it. The register is often memento mori, and a strong element of the work, the discovery surviving and being “worth it” — because Niebuhr’s passion aligned with what was needed. His weeks alone at Persepolis, the first European to survey the ancient Persian capital, will stay, as will the images of these compatriots shaking with malaria, and Niebuhr returning home alone.
When he reached the farm near Altenbruch he dismounted, unpacked his astrolabe as a matter of course, set it up, measured the latitude of the place and calmly entered the result in his tables, where the town of Altenbruch still figures to-day in the same columns as Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Bombay.
Links
Maciej Cegłowski went looking for the deep biosphere: “We have yet to drill a hole so deep that we don’t find a microbial population at the bottom of it.” What do they eat? It relies on Landauer: each bit of computation requires less energy, and you can rest for longer and longer times between bits.
Penn Jillette on the secrets of fire-eating:
You shouldn’t be doing this. It’s dangerous and if you do everything right, you’ll still get hurt. The definition of a stupid thing is something that if you do everything right, you still get hurt. Fire-eating and love are stupid things.
How is this… possible? All of the tropes in this 53-year-old fan fiction parody piece are also recognizable as modern parody. Also, the origin of “Mary Sue”.
Andrew Batson is really smart and entirely right about the accounting.
If China would just pursue a conventional macro policy of moderate inflation and full employment, its own citizens would benefit massively and its trading partners would be much happier. There would be peace on earth and goodwill toward men! 🙂
I didn’t think that a 2014 NYT interview with Jan Morris could upset me so much:
I would like to have written books about San Francisco and Lhasa, but circumstances have prevented it, and now it is too late.
New on demography and fertility , from Fernández-Villaverde and coauthors: “In short, modernity in its current form seems largely incompatible with replacement-level fertility.”
Our conjecture is that a modern society makes the third child expensive and childlessness cheap, even when GDP per capita is only a fraction of the frontier… At the same time, children are no longer productive in the household, not even for smaller chores, having been replaced by “engines of liberation” such as the electric appliances now available even to poor households.
Why are plumbers paid more in the US? Philippe Lemoine, patiently.
it’s often easier to talk about why such workers are paid more today than they were in the past in the same country despite not having become more productive in that sense, but as we shall see that’s essentially the same question.
The point of this article is that you’ve never heard of NBA YoungBoy. You should have!
I took this essay very seriously, even going so far as to use some of my old music industry contacts to reach out to YoungBoy’s team for a quote. Not that I expected him to respond, after all what is The Metropolitan Review to someone like NBA YoungBoy? What is any publication, big or small, to NBA YoungBoy? Nothing. Less than nothing.
For three years , I’ve used this paper, newly out in Management Science, as a counterexample to the raft of RCTs which find that AI reduces skill disparities. I previously thought it was a rich country/poor country thing, but newer experiments are complicating the picture. Here’s one new RCT from Texas also showing widening disparities.
The increase in appeal filing was smaller among less-advantaged households, providing suggestive evidence that the chatbot widened existing disparities.
In cyber defense, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad.
If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
Tyler Cowen thinks it might almost be time to go to Somalia: “I will repeat my recent point that many dangerous places in the world are about to become much, much safer.”
What backs government debt? NBER asked investors, voters, and econ graduates to explain why government debt has value. This is not reassuring.
Global safe-asset demand and permanent rollover together account for almost half of perceived value in every group, so debt value heavily relies on investor absorption rather than on government resources. Future primary surpluses, the textbook debt backing, receive about 16% even among the graduate-trained.
Amelia Michael on robots : how frontier models could leapfrog the standard robotics data-scaling path.
Robotics progress might be chugging along within one paradigm (e.g., collecting tons of teleoperation data), only for frontier models to accelerate capabilities through an entirely different paradigm, like using advanced simulation.
Previously
…