📚 Essays worth your time

The Ghost of Microgravity in Astronauts’ Brains

Get a grip The post The Ghost of Microgravity in Astronauts’ Brains appeared first on Nautilus.

Against the New Literalism

On IQ, AI, Gender, &c.

We’re All Wrong About Men and Feminism

Rosa Campbell at Literary Hub: In 1977, a man working on a drilling rig in Alaska, far from his home, sat down and wrote a letter. He’d been working as a “roughneck” handling the drill in freezing Arc

Monday links: AI assumptions

Coffee Break: Palantir’s Manifesto Drops and So Does Objection

Palantir, the ontology company, has dropped a new manifesto, and co-founder Peter Thiel has a scary new company called Objection.

How to Stand Out When Everyone Uses AI

No one is safe from this deadly trap

The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived

Konstantin Kakaes at Quanta: Mathematicians who had dismissed AI models as too error-prone to be useful started playing around with them. Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that t

Announcing Progress Conference 2026

Oct 8–11 in Berkeley, CA: A four-day event to connect people in the progress movement

The new AI model that’s alarming Washington

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Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026)

Today's links Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MPAA's threat-based 'education'; Cuehack; Heinlein on GWB; AT&T v

A Brief History of the Bizarre-Looking Anglerfish

These mysterious species have a lot of tricks The post A Brief History of the Bizarre-Looking Anglerfish appeared first on Nautilus.

Why is everything sold to us as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?

Julian Baggini at The Guardian: For a long time, I have been privately lamenting the instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself any more but is only seen as useful i

Against Absolutist Deontology

Against absolute rights

What I'm reading about Orbán and Hungary, a postwar noir spy thriller set in ruined Frankfurt, and more

Roundup 04/20/2026

Islamic Lettrism & the Hurufi Movement

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Adviser links: shadow advisers

Mondays are all about financial adviser-related links here at Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s links including a look at...

Cocaine Fish: How Salmon Behave When Amped Up on Coke

The effects of cocaine pollution in the world’s waterways The post Cocaine Fish: How Salmon Behave When Amped Up on Coke appeared first on Nautilus.

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels?

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life. The post What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biolog

Momotaro

Oftentimes I need to be reminded again and again to do something (or not do it). In this case, I read about this adorable focus timer app in Dense Discovery and filed it away, then spaced. / thanks to

The myth of Nauru

Many countries want to copy Australia’s immigration rules. But its most-copied border policy is not the one that worked.

Wagner Gone Wrong

A. J. Goldmann at The New Criterion: The opening of Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) contains one of the most effective uses of music by Richard Wagner in film. A low, sonorous note seems to ris

SubTuringBradBot Is Finally Live—at Least for Now: Monday MAMLMs

The dining-room-corner linear algebra experiment, or, why I am trying to build a BradBot instead of a FAQ list—SubTuringBradBot, office hours, gasbags, and “hexapodia”…

Here to Make Friends, again!

The number one request I get is if we’d ever reprint the Here to Make Friends shirt, thanks in big part to its inclusion in Austin Kleon’s first book. This Saturday we’re throwing it back on the press

Postponing the World’s Financial Winter – For How Long? Iran’s MAD Standoff with the Rest of the World

Micheal Hudson describes how the US and Iran threats against energy production is MAD, as in mutual assured destruction.

Columbia University Taught the World to Hate Jews

The intellectual roots of modern antisemitism originated in the Columbia English department

A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City

Martin Vander Weyer at Literary Review: Following a chance conversation with a stranger in a London television studio in 2023, Radden Keefe picks up the unsolved mystery of a young man’s death and emb

The Reflexivity of Credit Markets

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Rethinking Exit Strategies: How Machine Learning Can Boost Anomaly Returns

Nitin Kumar, Nagpurnanand Prabhala, and Ravi Ranjan, authors of the January 2026 study “Anomaly Premiums with Dynamic Exits,” challenged a fundamental assumption in quantitative investing: that you sh

Ibrahim Traoré Would Like to Be Thomas Sankara’s Heir

Burkina Faso’s military leader, Ibrahim Traoré, has styled himself as the political heir of Thomas Sankara. However, the substance of Traoré’s record since taking power in 2022 is much less ambitious

Communists Helped Build the Mighty New York Hotel Union

Before they faced fierce repression from the US government at the outbreak of the Cold War, early 20th-century Communist labor organizers helped build the New York hotel workers’ union into one of the

The Old Guard: Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis

Samuel Myon in Harper’s Magazine: In Greek myth, Eos falls in love with Tithonus. She is the goddess of the dawn. He is a Trojan prince, yet still a mere mortal. Eos asks Zeus to give her mate the gif

Import AI 454: Automating alignment research; safety study of a Chinese model; HiFloat4

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Huawei’s HiFloat4 training forma

Will Price Transparency Cure America's High Healthcare Costs?

Why more information is not always better

Talk Your Book: Juicing Your Returns

On today's Talk Your Book we speak with Matt Kaufman from Calamos about how autocallable ETFs work, the structured products boom and a new way to target growth in your portfolio. The post Talk Your Bo

What Does War Is "Too Easy" For The USA Mean?

Phillips’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication.

Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries

For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data. Whi

Talk Your Book: Juicing Your Returns

Links 4/20/2026

<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/04/links-4-20-2026.html"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-309018" src="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HGBcWmhasAArl

Iran War: Talks Kiboshed, U.S. Seizes Iranian Tanker, Leaks Confirm Mad King Claims

Leaks from White House insiders reveal Trump kept out of situation room in key moments of war. Iran won't be going to more talks.

“I’m Running Because It Shouldn’t Be So Hard to Live Here”

Aparna Raj is a tenant organizer and socialist running for city council in Washington, DC. We spoke to Raj about the affordability crisis in the nation’s capital and why the push for DC statehood will