Publications

Ian Leslie in The Ruffian: Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”....

Enter an address and get a 3D file to print or order a printed version. Neato! I'm trying to figure out how topography i...

In her 'Notes on Spite', has suggested a productive new area for enquiry. What are the great works of art and literary c...

Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Let us know what you think at i...

How can you tell if a tech bubble is about to burst? Consider this recent conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and Mark ...

Jane Austen was attuned to the ways that "little matters" — footstools, boots, curtains – can reveal big things...

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison Podcast!This is not your ordinary literature podcast. Join me as I explore the state...

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladne...

NewsNation's Chris Cuomo wants you to know he's a serious journalist. He's a former CNN anchor, which makes it extra spe...

Greetings all — Busy week in BITM land. Got home from some travel only to take off to SF to speak on a panel about AI an...

Photo: GettyIn 1955, travel editor Richard Joseph and his wife, Morgan, left the intensity of New York behind and settle...

Greetings from Read Max HQ, now returned to its rightful place in Brooklyn! Today, we're writing about Luke Farritor, "c...

Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with my quiet here while I was away trying to get some focused time working on ...

Many modern stories you know well are in fact far older than you think. In the case of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, there...

For the past week, I've been reading a set of stories, written by Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s, about a tall, bra...

Many things in the world have not been named openly; and many things, even if they are admitted, have never been describ...

For every person mareveling at the ease of creation, there is another grieveing what feels like the death of the process...

Illustration by Alexander NaughtonYou are allowed to care about people who don't care about you, and even people who dis...

Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven't done so yet, please hit subscribe to r...

Real GDVheads will know I've spent most of the summer off the grid trying to write my book. They'll know this because I ...

Gala "Flowers and Butterflies", Salle des Ambassadeurs du Casino, Cannes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1935Above my writing d...

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Gisnep, the daily puzzle I made initially just because I liked the name. So ...

Last month, on the Daily Beast podcast, journalists Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff took turns reeling off a list of famo...

"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of ...

]]><![CDATA[Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only...

"Do you have anything you would recommend on...?" It is a question I get asked regularly by readers and those interested...

"Study Mode," a new educational feature released yesterday by OpenAI to much fanfare, was inevitable. The roadblocks wer...

The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, w...

I love cooking from this guy's newsletter/instagram.ChuckEggplant Coconut AdoboEggplant Coconut Adobo...Read more14 days...

Hi All,Its fascinating how quickly a story can drop out of the news when the drama becomes less intense and the media th...

these are only the people James Holmes killed; the 70 that he wounded would not fit comfortably in my newsletterI am ind...

I have a new article at UnHerd that goes deep into the polling data to determine why Democrats are now so unpopular.Demo...

 The latest on Musk's favorability ratingUpdated August 10, 2025Elon Musk has taken a major step back from politics, at...

The month of Augustus Caesar has arrived, which means that the Blog is officially on hiatus until the new school year. B...

In 1920, a year of hunger and hardship, a group of Austrians decided to start a music festival. World War I had just end...

The relationship between ideas and policymaking is sometimes imagined as linear: politicians seek solutions, and intelle...

John Steele is a former miner. These days, aged sixty, he is a Christian street preacher who takes the Gospel around his...

Matsyanyaaya: Trump2.0 and India - the Avengers editionBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action—Pranay Kota...

(Side Note: Last week I read Mark Zuckerberg's new Superintelligence memo and offered my reactions in a piece for Tech P...

A review of the development and current undue power of corporations provides insightful history but goes off the rails o...

Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road.Kate Diehn-Bitt (German, 1900-1978)...

Do you know Morgan Ranstrom? He's a wealth advisor at Trailhead Planners, author, musician with Stone Arch Rivals, and s...

First off: two more of my inequality primers are now free at the Stone Center web site. The list so far:Why did the rich...

Can Google sustain itself this way, as it makes a very high stakes bet on transforming itself from gateway to gatekeeper...

Photo by Previn Samuel on UnsplashI really believe that Indian industrialization is one of the most important stories in...

The names of equity-income funds imply that they are aimed at investors who desire to withdraw their higher dividends as...

Raj Chetty is best known for extremely labor-intensive studies, with dozens of research assistants assembling and cleani...

Welcome to this week's media roundup! It has been a very hectic week for me as I was finally able to launch many new and...

Welcome to the 1,148 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 247,246 smart, curious folks ...

At the start of July, I updated my estimates of equity risk premiums for countries, in an semiannual ritual that goes ba...

This is the third (and presently the final) installment of my short essays on new capitalism. This essay deals with inco...

In June, 1,200 scholars and activists from around the world gathered in Norway for a historic convergence of two movemen...

Mike Green, Chief Strategist at Simplify, has been kicking around the active-passive debate with me for years now, and I...

Note: I started this newsletter way back in 2022, after leaving Scroll.in to take up a post as diplomatic spouse and ful...

Pei-Shen Qian was a talented street painter who found no success – until he began to forge the works of his idols...

1 Introduction The Rationalists are a group of people, largely in the Bay Area, who spend their time on the internet sit...

Should it be possible to own an idea? The debate around intellectual property has deep roots in the history of philosoph...

Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don...

This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareFacebook memories informed me this morning that two years ago today I ...

People forget that I am in love with a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When I read Kant, it's like reading Newton: a r...

Protagoras the Sophist (left) vs Plato the Philosopher (right).In 5th century BCE Athens the power of speech was crucial...

A decade ago, the French economist Thomas Piketty published “Capital In The 21st Century,” a blockbuster screed against ...

Get 25% off for 1 yearI, Justin Smith-Ruiu (ב), born 30071972 and uploaded 18102036, hereby submit to the Council my Pet...

When a house burns, it is in a decay mode. As it is when it is abandoned. The large systems in which houses are embedded...

Author: Dan Peterson Category: Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, Philosophy of Sex and Gender...

This August at The Portal we host philosopher Dylan Shaul for a series of reflections under the theme of "Metaphysics Re...

PAN IV, 2023, by Ross SimoniniLast year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any...

Lots of people think that a few people controlling a very large share of a society's economic power is a bad thing. It i...

[This article has a 3/10 Woo Rating].If the purpose of our existence is the evolution of our consciousness, then maps of...

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)"Why is there only one possible exit from modern philosophy? Because modern philosophy lives an...

When Doyle Ivie, a 77-year-old farmer and sheepdog trainer in northern Georgia, received an email from Saad Bhamla and T...

&ldquo;Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!&rdquo; a physicist bellowed into a microphone one evening in June, and t...

Guangzhou Circle, Guangzhou, China, via @sci_fi_infra.Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links re...

In the next section of Chapter 3, Communities of Practice, Steward Brand writes about history's great stewards of mainte...

<p>Good post on what the meaning of <a href="https://dynomight.net/heritable/">heritability</a>. </p> <p>Only a crazy <a...

Humanity's ability to produce enough food for 8 billion people is impressive.1 In fact, we could produce enough calories...

Self-control, grit, growth mindset – trendy skills won’t transform children’s lives, but more meaningful interventions c...

Sexual deception. Cheating. Breakups. Stalking. Struggles to find a decent partner. All of these things, different as th...

Ana Gantman, Jordan Wylie, and I are starting a series of studies looking at everyday revenge. One approach is to ask pe...

I've been working recently on a project with Henry Farrell about possible futures and reactions to the USA's weaponisati...

photo cred: my dadLook, I don't know if AI is gonna kill us or make us all rich or whatever, but I do know we've got the...

Today's links AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot: Errors that are tuned to be statistically i...

In this issue: learnings from the first month of our Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business. From the importan...

Welcome to the quiz edition of this newsletter! If you're new to this publication, start here! The content published her...

If chatbots answer your queries, AI agents are supposed to do things on your behalf, to actively take care of your life ...

GPT-5 is out. The release went like this:Altman *official tone*: "this is the most powerful ai model ever made. it also ...

["One Third of a Nation," by O. Louis Gugliemi, from the Met Collection]A few months back, I argued that political scien...

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the commun...

Today provides one of the most beautiful, delicate feelings that I know and wait for, and first I have to provide some b...

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you...

Vibe code is legacy code by Steve Krouse...

Note: Logpodge posts are a break from my usual long-form writing and book reviews, presenting short, topical essays. If ...