What am I up to now?
April, 2025
Contents
Updates
I’m in DC for all of April! I’m thinking deeply about the bureaucracy of very poor governments and how these institutions will change in the next decade. I’m learning about the culture and politics around sovereign debt in poor African countries. I’m reading Márquez, Braudel, and Ibbotson. If any of this sounds interesting, please say hi!
The rest of my year is coming together:
May: Oxford for Trinity term, the UK baseball national championships, meetings with funders
June: Oxford (Summer VIIIs, end of the school year), then to Alaska for LB’s wedding
July: Up for grabs; possibly a trip to West Africa
August: Bay Area for a summer school
September: Possibly staying in the Bay Area! Maybe some mountains
October: Back to Oxford for the new school year
November: A quiet Oxford autumn
December: Still up in the air, but we’re planning a few ambitious trips. I’m hoping to meet a penguin.
A lot of the above depends on My Wonderful Girlfriend’s doings. She is constantly motivating me to be more ambitious with all of the pots she keeps on the fire. I’ve been applying to more things — fellowships, summer schools, research grants — because of her. A PhD is a great excuse for cowardice. Not everyone has this problem: I use my PhD as a reason not to apply for things; my friend DB uses “applying to things” as a reason not to work on his PhD. I think his approach is probably more promising!
Reading
I’ve been coming up against a problem for this section recently: all of the book reviews and paper reviews I start writing feel like they deserve their own posts. Here are a few “Reading” sections I’ve started recently, which then moved to my drafts section:
• Books and papers I read when I want to believe in the EMH less
• Monetary policy and fixed income securities in the Star Wars universe
• Reading with AI only works if the book is in context (contra Cowen and Perrell)
Maybe some of these will end up on my blog tab in the next month!
One thing that does fit nicely here is this monster profile of William T. Vollmann, the Californian writer who only writes in blocks of one-thousand pages. His new novel, a history of the CIA, is three thousand pages long; when his publisher asked him to cut it down a bit, he agreed, and came back a few months later having added four hunded pages. So he found a new publisher.
I’ve found Vollmann fascinating for a while. The FBI thought that he was the Unabomber. His visual art is weird; his defining series of novels, Seven Dreams, is on the history of Native American conflict. He loves traveling to warzones. What more could I ask for in a modern writer?
The problem has always been the page count. I’ve only read a bit of Vollmann, primarily An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World, the abridged Rising Up and Rising Down,Abridged down to only 700 pages. and excerpts from his book on climate. The profile highlights a few completionists, who intend to read every word he publishes for eternity. That will never be me. I’ll buy the new CIA novel when it’s published; he deserves that much regard. But I’m not optimistic about me and a novel whose “protagonist remained unborn […] after seven hundred pages”.
Vollmann is a test of attention span; not for public consumption. His lack of self-restraint costs him some audience. He doesn’t care. Some people can’t stop themselves from writing (most people-who-write well, in fact). I don’t think Bill Vollmann cares if we read his books.
Links
We found Cleo, the magic integral solver. Famous for finding elegant and unexpected solutions to terrifying looking integrals, Cleo was a sockpuppet account of a well-intentioned Uzbek programmer. Why did he do it?
I was frustrated that when I posted questions about integrals on math stack exchange, I often received comments like “why is this interesting” or, “what makes you think that it might have a closed form solution?”
And he took that personally.
The names of all of the snowplows of Wichita.
When Mario Vargas Llosa Punched Gabriel García Márquez. An LLM offhandedly mentioned this incident, in a conversation where it had hallucinated character and plot details of Love in the Time of Cholera, so I almost assumed it away. But!
I know the truth about that fight. I’ll tell you. Look, Mario has been a great womanizer and he’s a very good-looking man. Women die for Mario. So Mario, on a trip he made by ship from Barcelona to El Callao, met a very beautiful woman. They fell in love. He left his wife and went off with her. And the marriage was over and all that. His wife went back to pack up the house and, of course, she began to see friends. Then they got back together and his wife told Vargas Llosa, “Don’t think I’m not attractive. Friends of yours like Gabo were after me … ” One day they met in a theater in Mexico City, and Gabo went toward him with open arms. Vargas Llosa made a fist and said, “For what you tried to do to my wife,” and knocked him to the ground. Then Ms. Gaba said, “What you’re saying can’t be true because my husband likes women, but only very good-looking women.”
A stanford undergrad’s physics homework from the late 90s: “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass”. The conclusion:
Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should’ve declared CS. I still wouldn’t have any women, but at least I’d be rolling in cash.
He is now a Staff Engineer at Google.
Gwern is also good at metaphors:
I’ve speculated that the effect of hyper-speed media like social media is to destroy the multi-level filtering of society, and the different niches wind up separating and becoming self-contained hermetic ecosystems. (Have you ever used a powerful stand mixer to mix batter and set it too high? What happens? Well, if the contents aren’t liquid enough to flow completely at high speed, you tend to observe that your contents separate, and shear off into two or three different layers, rotating inside each other, with the inner layer spinning ultra-rapidly while the outer layer possibly becoming completely static and stuck to the sides of the mixing bowl. The inner layer is Tiktok, and the stuck outer layer is places like academia. The big fads and discoveries and trends in Tiktok spin around so rapidly and are forgotten so quickly that none of them ever ‘make it out’ to elsewhere.)
The last thing I intend to read about Satoshi Nakamoto.We will never know and that’s fine.
Matt Lakeman on the conquest of the Incas.
Voltaire claimed that the Circassians invented vaccination because their kids had to be hot for the harems. Also, Benedictines catching strays:
Some people maintain that the Circassians originally took this custom from the Arabs, but we leave this historical point to be cleared up by some learned Benedictine, who will doubtless compose several folio volumes on the subject, with proofs.
Tyler Cowen has been enormously influential on me, even years after I’ve stopped reading Marginal Revolution; my social circle and online world sometimes feel like the Tyler Cowen Cinematic Universe. I enjoyed this profile in The Economist.
Cowen’s emotional life remains a mystery. He told me he did not experience regret. “I don’t know what the function of it is,” he said. “Is it to signal thoughtfulness? To stop you making further mistakes? It’s like revenge. I don’t understand it.” Cowen also said he didn’t understand envy or anger. He didn’t know what he should be envious of. He didn’t get lonely, by himself or in company. He actually said, “Why bother?”
When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He had never been clinically depressed? Depressed for a month? For a week? An afternoon? I looked up from my notebook. An enormous smile, one I’d not seen before, had spread across the whole of Cowen’s face.
“Like, for a whole afternoon?” he asked, hugely grinning.
Reginald Foster was a Vatican Latinist for 40 years and a passionate Latin teacher. He died in 2020. A recent profile and this older one in The American Scholar were both touching.
And in many ways Foster’s resembles the life of a medieval saint: at the age of six, he would play priest, ripping up old sheets as vestments. He entered seminary at thirteen. He said he wanted only three things in life: to be a priest, to be a Carmelite, and to do Latin. He has spent his entire life in great personal poverty. His cell had no mattress: he slept on the tile floor with a thin blanket. His clothes were notorious in Rome: believing that the religious habit no longer reflected the simple garb of the people as it once had, he gave up his cassock and bought his clothes at Sears: blue pants and a blue shirt, with brandless black sneakers. When it was cold he added a zip-up blue polyester jacket. The Vatican’s Swiss guards called him “il benzinaio,” the gas-station attendant. Reporting for work at the Vatican, he looked like someone called to fix one of the washing-machines in the laundry room. His outfit was more like something his own father, a plumber in Milwaukee, would have worn. When people would give him gifts, he would give them to the poor. He owned almost nothing, and his Vatican office was legendarily spare: a typewriter, pens and paper, one chair, one desk, and a Latin dictionary. Nothing mattered to him except Latin.
Bhutan has spent half of their foreign reserves on Bitcoin mining infrastructure over the past four years. Their currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, so I’m reading this as a highly-leveraged crypto position with sovereign characteristics.
If you define your least favorite book as:
All that prose talent, spent on a book about bad people doing nothing in a world the author hated. Two or three lines so beautiful they linger for me even now, trapped inside a profoundly cynical, empty book.
Then one might choose Gatsby or One Hunded Years of Solitude. I would defend Márquez, as that was what he was trying to do. Maybe Houellebecq’s Whatever? I don’t know his early biography enough to say if he hated that world even then.
Other art
I’ve been going to weekly life drawing sessions in Oxford with LT; I finished my first sketchbook in January. I am Bad at drawing, but that’s not the point. Drawing makes me enjoy things more. Alice Gribbin recently wrote about the nude and how it’s been devalued. I found it valuable in the context of going to my first nude life drawing sessions.
In public and private life today, a person’s primary visual encounters with imagery of the naked or semi-naked human figure are through neither art nor worship but advertising, entertainment, and porn. It’s pathetic that this is true. We choose another way.
I watched one great movie this month, The Battle of Algiers. I avoid great movies; an hour with a great book somehow is still more worth it than an hour with a great movie. Algiers has a really strong documentary feel, and the soundtrack and sound design were excellent. I was surprised to hear how strongly it influenced American counter-insurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan; on the doctrine spectrum from Afghanistan to Vietnam, Algiers would have pushed us toward Vietnam. The acting was excellent. I also watched two peak Kevin Costner movies, Bull Durham and No Way Out. Both were fun; Bull Durham is the best baseball movie.
In poetry, I read William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All after I got to DC; it goes well with the cherry blossoms blooming. Whenever I read Williams or Whitman, I wish I could see in NYC what they saw.
I finished working through Ted Gioia’s list of 2024 albums. A few favorites from the bottom of the list:
• Songs of my land, Chiyomi Yamada and baobab
• Echoes of Becoming, Canberk Ulaş
• Riley, Riley Mulherkar
• Banjo Mantras, Kendl Winter
Previously
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