What am I up to now?
July, 2025
Contents
Updates
June was the most travel-heavy month I’ve had since 2021: fourteen flights in 30 days, and my first circumnavigation! I spent the first week in Oxford in a whirl of trip planning and room-tidying. Then I returned to Sierra Leone: also something I haven’t done since 2021! I was briefly tricked into thinking Freetown had changed, by the wholly new airport in Lungi, but after a week in the city, I’m happy to report it’s exactly the same. Still geographically gorgeous, still humid, still full of 12-year-olds on motorcycles, still dirty and wet in the summer, and presumably still dirty and dusty in the winter. My project in Sierra Leone with JB is proceeding well, and we’ll hopefully have reason and funding to return soon!
After the Freetown trip, I was faced with a dilemma: I had to be in Gustavus, Alaska for LB and HB’s wedding in four days. There’s no way to get to Gustavus except through Juneau, and no way to get to Juneau except through Seattle, and no way to get from Freetown to Seattle at all efficiently. For my layover, I chose 36 hours in Singapore to visit friends. I got lunch with a mentor SPH and also a friend from undergrad, KM, and stayed with ZL of Oxford. It was purely an eating vacation, altough the old city hall and the botanical gardens were also special. This was my first trip east of India!
The highlight of the month was 100% Gustavus: the wedding was perfect, and I have no words for the next four days, kayaking and camping with friends in Glacier Bay National Park. The final campsite we stayed at was the most beautiful place I’ve ever slept: a small island, a quarter mile off the coast, back in the spruce, on beds of needles. I’ve never been anywhere like it.
I’m writing this on the last day of June from Seattle, where I spent the past three days with my sister Abigail. We saw nine bookstores,The clear winners were Left Bank and Long Brothers, but the only place I bought something was Open Books, a poetry only shop on Pioneer Square. , ate many fish and berries, and saw cool friends: hers A and W; mine SB. Seattle in the summer is pretty idyllic; after Sierra Leone (hot, humid, buggy), Singapore (incredibly humid), and Gustavus (super duper incredibly buggy), Seattle weather was just… perfect? No notes.
I’ll be in Berkeley for the rest of July and most of August. I enjoyed my first experience with Berkeley earlier this year. This summer is an especially good time for me to get to know it better: I’ll be spending most of the 4th year of my PhD at Cal! Ted Miguel, my grand-supervisor, is hosting me at the Econ Department, and there are a lot of other faculty and students I’m excited to work with.
I’ll be staying with my wonderful girlfriend in Southside. Any Berkeley people: please reach out!
Reading
Only a few books this month:
Against the Grain (Scott)
A recent book by James Scott, differentiating the development of the first states from the invention of farming. The field has changed a lot from when he entered it in the 1970s.
Glorious Exploits (Lennon)
A novel about two Syracusans arranging a performance of Euripides’ Medea using Athenian prisoners of war. I really liked the Euripides parts!
The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Caro)
I’m more than 2,500 pages in, and he’s not even VP yet. If Caro doesn’t finish the series, I will be heartbroken; much more so than GRRM or Rothfuss, may he complete his work!
Firehouse (Halberstam)
A short book written from the Engine 40, Ladder 35 firehouse on the upper west side in the two months after 9/11; the house had 95%+ higher mortality.
Links
Gross tonnage is actually a measure of volume, not weight?
This article on the 11th century Chinese government “Tea and Horse Agency” would make a great episode in Statecraft.
When a state finds itself lacking in an essential raw material, there are only two possible routes of action. Either it must procure the resource from elsewhere, or it must better equip itself to produce the resource at home. The former was the goal behind the Tea and Horse Agency 茶馬司, a government superintendancy put in place in 1074 under Grand Councilor and reformer Wang Anshi 王安石 (1026–1086).
I spent a lot of time on planes this month, and therefore a lot of time reading Admiral Cloudberg. Particularly good:
The question facing National Transportation Safety Board investigators as they arrived on the scene was not an unfamiliar one: why was the plane over here, and not over there?
I don’t think of Tanner Greer as a particularly cheerful writer, but he was also disappointed in the gloominess of the great book Stoner:
I read Stoner not long after finishing Blood Meridian. Nothing in that bloodbath of a book—not even that infamous tree of dead babies—prompted the sort of visceral reaction I felt here. In some ways this is a testament to William’s skill as a writer. Yet all of these sad happenings point to a weakness in Williams’ craft. Tragedy is a crutch that Williams cannot stop using.
I spent $5 and downloaded all of Sam Kriss’ paywalled posts. Here’s is a list of new words I learned: scotomastic, oleaginously, gurning, quodlibet, corundum, vavasour, anchorites, cackhanded, anagnorisis, punctums, apophatic, pullulation, physalis, vatic, captagon, aretaic. He can also turn a phrase. On getting men to read again:
nobody remembers what we like. It’s been a long time since the heyday of the literary bloke, and there will be a lot of cackhanded attempts. Would you like a book about how it’s ok to be vulnerable? Would you like to be nurtured? How about a novel with camo on the cover, about chill guys who just like hanging out? Maybe you want repeated attempts to turn the figure of the incel into a totemic literary everyman? But in fact, the solution is staring us in the face. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is the first Booker Prize-winning novel in a long time that people actually want to read. This is partly because while it’s fairly boring, it’s also quite short. But I think the main reason is that despite its lack of any real action, it’s still a novel about a small crew in a tiny craft voyaging around the world. It fills a hole in the literary landscape. We have no end of genre fiction and autofiction and the campus novel and the systems novel and the social novel and the trauma novel and the memoir, but the one classic form that’s still missing is the tale of the sea. Where is the Zoomer Melville? The first person to publish a panoptic 900-page novel set among the polyglot crew of a container ship will single-handedly end this stupid battle of the sexes for a generation. They’ll build statues of you. Get writing.
Who remembers the Pueblo Incident ? An American spy ship was captured by the North Koreans in 1967, and the crew were held captive. After the captain confessed to spying, they were released:
Bucher wrote the confession since a ‘confession’ by definition needed to be written by the confessor himself. They verified the meaning of what he wrote, but failed to catch the pun when he said “We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung” (“Paean” sounds almost identical to “pee on”).
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