📚 Essays worth your time

Remake or Replace Tribes

Tribes contain factions.

March into the Ruins

Bruce Robbins in The Baffler: In a documentary i saw some years ago, I remember Jürgen Habermas, when asked to describe his friend the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, responded that for all his

The Social Edge of Intelligence

Bright Simons in The Ideas Letter: We are on the verge of the age of human redundancy. In 2023, IBM’s chief executive told Bloomberg that soon some 7,800 roles might be replaced by AI. The following y

Purposeful Predictions

Ben Recht over at his substack, arg min: Every engineer and scientist knows there is a fundamental difference between a “simulation” and a “prediction,” but what is the root of that distinction? At th

onfocus moodboard

I subscribe to a lot of visual blogs via RSS. It's probably around 100 feeds that are mostly at tumblr, some indie blogs, some mastodon feeds, some subreddits, and various others like the fun MLTSHP c

New All-Time Highs

The Roaring 20s are in full swing in the stock market. The post New All-Time Highs appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...

Sunday Thread + Mailbag

Ask your questions below.

Attic iCloud Photo backup

I meticulously backup my iCloud Photos with regularity in old fashioned ways. I’d love to offload this task to automation. Perhaps Attic will be the gateway to really learning the command line and S3

The Kripkean Revolution

How Saul Kripke shattered the orthodoxy

Sunday links: the continued spend

Asha Bhosle (1933 – 2026) Bollywood Singer

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Pearl Fryar (1939 – 2026) Topiarist

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Yale Spent a Year Figuring Out Why Everyone Hates Yale

Maine presses pause on large data centers. Will other states follow its lead?

The moratorium is the first of its type to pass a legislative chamber, but about a dozen other states have pending proposals.

Victor Serge Was One of the Great Revolutionary Writers

Victor Serge lived through a remarkable sequence of revolutionary upheavals before dying in Mexican exile at the age of 56. Serge’s life and work, caught between hope and despair, can help us understa

Wayne Perkins (1951 – 2026) Legendary Guitarist

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Why AI Needs A Sense Of Smell

Philip Maughan in Noem: Over the last few years, breakthroughs in AI have been almost too numerous to track. Chatbots can now pass the same exams required of doctors and lawyers. A cancer drug designe

Top clicks this week on Abnormal Returns

Thanks for checking in with us this weekend. Here are the most clicked on items on Abnormal Returns for the week ended...

How to train your brain to see possibility instead of doom

Hannah Critchlow in The Guardian: It can feel as though the world is tilting towards chaos: political shocks, economic instability, technological upheaval and a constant stream of bad news. Faced with

Sunday Poem

Why I Write Poetry Because I can’t trust God to look after the world and my friends. Worship sure, wandering forests of legend braiding flowers from the Tree of Life in my hair while God’s beard storm

LA Socialists’ Debates Reflect the Left’s Growing Strength

Inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York and building their own electoral powerhouse, LA’s socialists recently deliberated on whether to weigh in on their city’s mayoral race. The questions co

Links 4/19/2026

<a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/04/Links-4-19-2026.html"><img src="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Dolphin.jpg" width="300" height="300" "class=aligncenter siz

Iran War: Mad King Trump Gets the Strait Slammed in His Face

A rapidly declining Trump is living in a "dark fantasy" world as the Iranians close the Strait in anger at his lies. Meanwhile the MSM is beginning to break some bad news about the war.

Top Links 1077 The hyperscaling upper bound. Why the rupee matters to Modi. The air-pollution mega-killers & sunken treasure in the Bay of Algeciras.

Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze

Dance Marathons Were the Forerunners of Today’s Reality TV

The dance marathons of the Great Depression have gone down in legend as a way of turning desperate people into fodder for exploitative entertainment. The spirit of the marathons is alive and well in t

Curing U.S. Health Care, Part I

America doesn’t have to be like this

The Sunday Morning Movie Presents: The Lathe Of Heaven (1980) Run Time 1H 37M

The Lathe of Heaven is a movie about the power of dreams and the dangers of hubris.

Civilizational optionality ⊗ The social edge of intelligence

No.399 — The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point ⊗ Frugal AI ⊗ Design futures in infrastructure ⊗ The AI revolution in math has arrived ⊗ First Indigenous Group to ban data centers from its lan

Socialists Are Cornering Hochul on Taxing the Rich

The movement for taxes on the rich in New York just scored its first goal against Kathy Hochul. And they say they’re not stopping there. Not so long ago, Governor Hochul said she’d never consider taxe

It’s Ok to Love All the Bees (The Honey Bees, Too)

Are honey bees to blame for disappearing native bees?

Judging Judges in the Era of Trump

by Ken MacVey It has become harder to be a judge, especially when it comes to politically controversial cases handled by federal judges. President Trump, his cabinet members, and White House spokesper

Dockworkers Against Russia’s and Israel’s Wars

In Sweden, workers boycotted Russian ships in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and then did the same for Israel’s arms trade. Their action shows the power of working-class solidarity against milit

Druski, Whiteface, and the Ethics of the Bit

by Steve Gimbel and Tom Wilk Comedian Druski’s impersonation of Erika Kirk has generated a predictable mixture of clicks, outrage, and threats of legal action. Kirk argued that the bit was immoral bec

The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of dee

Weekend Update #181; Germany Raises The Pot For Ukraine

The USA Boasts, Bluffs And Then Folds; More On Ukraine Fighting Humans With Machines

this is your sign to start journaling

because so many of us spend so little time with our thoughts now

Cultural Network Structure

How did our society decide how much to count things like education and artistic taste when evaluating prestige and status?

Moral Education in Indiana Prisons

an unpublished talk given at the Windmoor House

Shopkeeper Rampant

On numbers, friendship, and violence

"If you really believed that..."