What am I up to now?
January, 2025
Contents
Updates
Happy new year! I am spending my first week of 2025 near Lake Tahoe, hosted by the lovely and hospitable KGW. My wonderful girlfriend’s school friends (and assorted partners) are stuffed into a beautiful house right on the ski runs; for New Years Eve, we watched the local resort’s 9pm drone show.9pm because that’s midnight on the east coast, and the kids have to get to bed; drones because fireworks are a fire hazard.
The Bay Area has always loomed large in my imagination, at least since the 2010 Giant’s World Series Run. But I’ve never explored the city besides a hectic five days in 2022 and a more detailed exploration in 1997. I arrived in California just after Christmas, and I’ll be in San Francisco until the end of January.
I’ll be spending some time around Berkeley, along with general SF exploration. Please reach out if you would like to meet up.
Reading
Here is the list of books I read in 2024. The best part of making this list was going through the books I added to Zotero this year and remembering all the ones I neglected, abandoned, or skipped. So on New Year’s Day, I started two old acquisitions: a biography of Genghis Khan and a history of South Korean feminism.
Several of MWG’s friends in Tahoe were rushing to finish their annual reading goals (great job, RB). I didn’t have an explict goal in 2024, and I don’t for 2025. A few writers, especially Nabokov and Marquez, will remain high on my priorities, and I would love to read more works in translation.2022 was a particularly good year for that. I also would love to focus on some reading projects this year. In 2024, I read multiple books on Singapore, WWI, Xinjiang, and Everest. I look forward to a few such deliberate projects in 2025.
Links
An insightful review of a monograph on econophysics.
“You’ll also see paper after paper about the statistics of financial markets — and almost nothing about any other sort of market. There are two major reasons for this. First, financial markets produce huge volumes of high-quality data. It might be that the econophysicists’ tools are even better suited to (say) studying the dynamics of industrial competition, but they’ll never find the kind of data on manufacturing that they can get for financial markets. Second, that’s where the money is.”
Yet another short story riffing on Omelas. Paired well with an Arundhati Roy collection from 2005.
A collection of Russian jokes (“anekdoty”) about the Ukraine war.
Putin, after the Kursk incursion, is summoning Stalin’s ghost.
Stalin: “What’s wrong?”
Putin: “Nazis are circling Kursk! My army is retreating! What should I do?”
Stalin: “Do what I did in 1943. Send the best Ukrainian troops and ask US for help.”
Previously
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