What am I up to now?
September 1, 2025
November, 2025
Contents
Updates
I spent October in Maputo, Mozambique; my impressions of the city are here, and they’re very favorable. Thanks to ZL for travelling from London to visit!
I was there on a placement with the International Growth Center, working on digitalization and public finance. The IGC office in Maputo is very well-connected with government, and set up meetings for me with municipal and national government agencies. Digitalization is a hot topic, and African governments want to be seen as modernizing and efficient. My role was to find the compromise tools which give this appearance and also help the governments achieve their goals. Some of these are easy wins — e.g., supporting mobile money — but it’s a small intersection. I’ve had the most success pitching digital tools to support revenue collection.
I’ve also been contracted by the Digital Impact Alliance and the Gates Foundation to write case studies of AI use within African governance. These case studies will appear in a public report early in 2026, which I’ll share here. I’m specifically looking at how AI is being used in taxation and policy prioritization. Most of my case studies are from countries I work in. If you have other examples, please reach out!
In November, I’ll be in Addis, Freetown, Banjul, and back to Oxford. Please say hi! I’ll be moving out of my place in Oxford at the end of the month, so this is your last chance for a while.
Reading
Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel García Márquez
Twelve short stories, translated by Edith Grossman. Márquez blurs the line between his fiction and journalism more than usual. Five of the stories, he doesn’t say which, came from notes for journalistic articles which he never finished. I had completely forgotten reading ““I Only Came to Use the Phone”” in high school spanish, and also forgotten how much I hated it. My favorites were “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” and “Light is Like Water”. On net, this collection isn’t as strong as No One Writes to the Colonel.
The Lost Symbol, Angels and Demons, Dan Brown
Brown is a really fun read and an important part of some canon. My only familiarity with him was from this famous and funny review. I love Tom Clancy! I love Michael Crichton! Obviously I was going to like Dan Brown. I read each of these books in few hours; there’s no need to ingest the prose like Márquez’ stories, or reflect on character development like Pullman’s series. It’s just a dude, with some interesting ideas, and a fun story about those ideas. Also, I don’t think I’ve read a book with so many twists since Terra Ignota. Twists are fun.
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
I live right next to the Jericho boatyard in Oxford, which is an obsession of Pullman’s. The boatyard has been derelict and trapped in re-development hell since 1999. It also features heavily in The Golden Compass, the first book in Pullman’s trilogy. I partly picked this book up for preemptive nostalgia for Oxford, but also because of how much it shaped a few friends’ childhoods. I thought it was excellent, on par with the Narnia or Earthsea books. Fun metaphysics, and I’m a huge fan of “Let’s go kill God” plots.
The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis
I recently read Nathan Goldwag’s Narnia review and felt nostalgic for when I read Lewis as a kid. The Space Trilogy is much weirder than Narnia, and engages with Lewis’ politics much more. Honestly a bit too much Satan, and a really weird cosmology. The books work better if you let that wash over you. The biblical references I got; the weird medieval stuff I didn’t. The last book could just be a longer version of Lewis’ essay “The Inner Ring”, which is frequently recommended around Oxford.
I think that The Space Trilogy explicitly takes place in The Lord of the Rings universe.
Tell me slave, what is Numinor? The true West.
Links
I’m not paying for The Argument, but I should be. Lots of great articles this month, even though I skip all the polling. This article on ChatGPT and education left me feeling very lucky. On one hand, I’m jealous of my cousins, born 5-10 years before me, for growing up in the 90s cultural moment. On the other hand, if I had been born five years later, I would have been screwed by AI. I’ve always been a lazy student, and I never would have done a piece of homework or written an essay. I think I never would have learned.
I mentioned Nathan Goldwag’s Narnia reviews above. I think he has a really good ear for prose, and I’m linking to it again.
You have to imagine that a not-insignificant part of this book’s success was the title, right? Like, I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but it’s such a great hook, it drags you in immediately, tells you what kind of story you’re going to get, but doesn’t give you any hint of what’s going to happen. Marvelous. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first Narnia book, and probably still the best. Like any series, Narnia accumulated lore and backstory and history and canon, but this first book (like the original 1977 Star Wars) gets to just be a story, without having to worry about any of that. One of the things that’s so delightful about it is how unconcerned the novel is with explaining everything. At 186 pages, it’s even shorter than The Magician’s Nephew, and it manages to pack in multiple trips to Narnia, tea with Mr. Tumnus, Edmund’s betrayal, capture, and redemption, war with the White Witch, meeting Santa Claus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and an entire life lived as Kings and Queens of Narnia. Modern writers could stand to learn something here!
Jack CLark of Anthropic wrote a poem. All Of Us Will Talk
There are maybe a million people in the world,
Who know what is coming,
And there are maybe six billion religious people in the world,
Who know where we come from.
At some point soon there will be a reckoning,
And the two sides will get to count,
And we’ll learn which futures and which histories get to survive.
The results will not be pretty.
Tom Cunningham, recently moved from OpenAI to METR, gives his thoughts on academic economics and transformative AI. Most interesting are the sections on GDP’s faults as a measurement, his model of AI as information-sharing, his conjecture about dimensionality and bottlenecks, and the ethnography of senior economists.
The Psmiths on class in America are good. How did I not know that The Paris Review was originally a [front for the CIA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen? One of my favorite magazines.
The best way to know where you fall in America’s class system is to pay attention to which part of Fussell’s book make you feel uncomfortably seen. When you cringe and say, “Oh gosh, how did he know?!” that’s when you’ve found your your people.
Another short story take on “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, about growing up.
Isochrone maps show the area accessible from a central point in a given time. This article has one centered around London, comparing 1914 and 2016.
This article starts with a top-tier anthropological note, hits some fun history, contains good media criticism. And then the twist actually surprised me, despite being heavily telegraphed. Very well written, and yes I will change my purchasing behavior.
I remember reading about this girl almost a year ago! Huge congratulations.
On my bookshelp as a kid , there were ten Calvin and Hobbes books, and one Far Side book. I never liked the Far Side. [Jane Goodall loved the Far Side](https://mariakonnikova.substack.com/p/funny-or-offensive! I like that for her.
We get November baseball! This is the first baseball season I’ve paid attention to since before Covid, because I’ve had favorable timezones up until October. Still, I’ve been waking up around 5am to catch the end of playoff games, and it’s been a great postseason. For a good sense of what MWG has put up with this summer, watch the first 20 minutes of Caught Stealing. This was a great article about falling in love with baseball in Oakland.
At some point last year, sick as I was, I told my spouse, “let’s just go.” Tickets are cheap, it’s a short drive from our house, and if we got bored, we could always leave early. But halfway through the game I was grinning and didn’t stop. Baseball, as my dad knew all along, is fun. It’s a slow game of strategy, not the relentless pounding of basketball or hockey or the violent onslaught of football. With baseball, at some point, you just surrender to the zen of the game.
Previously
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