This video caught my eye on Reddit, and it’s pretty rad. “The Beginning of Electronic Music”. Imagine being this ahead of your time!
Most economists and most philosophers are hampered by being bad writers, leading even brilliant thoughts to be expressed clumsily. Friedrich Hayek did not have this problem. “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is perhaps his most famous essay. I recently reread it after finding the full text online, and it is a banger. Worth a read even for the non-economist.
Tyler Cowen strikes again. The most innovative living economist has written a new kind of book, one you can talk to and question through an A.I. interface that is integrated natively with the text. The book’s overt question is: “Who is the greatest economist of all time?” and yet the deeper question is: “Must books be intended for linear reading?” The question I’ve been turning over in my head since encountering and exploring this text is: “What is the fiction equivalent of this?” Still pondering.
My single favorite Western philosophy book, Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” is available here in its full text. The words “One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy” are perhaps the greatest spiritual prescription for life in a modern bureaucratic state. If you’ve never read this book, find the time. No prior philosophical reading required.
I have been trying to understand China better over the last several years, have done a lot of reading, and now think myself to understand China less well than when I started, which I suppose is a form of progress. I have been told that this book is an excellent primer on how China works at a nuts and bolts level. I have preordered it. Hopefully something will get through to me. If you are also interested in knowing more about China, perhaps you would also benefit.
This is an excellent interview with John and Patrick Collison, co-founders of Stripe, some of the youngest self-made billionaires in world history, and two of the most overtly brilliant people I’ve ever heard speak. It could hardly be more worth your time.
For any teachers interested in the latest thinking on homework in a world with ChatGPT, here is a podcast on exactly that topic, which I, as a non-teacher, found very informative.
Here is a wide-ranging interview with Katalin Kariko, recent Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of mRNA technology. Her personal story—and the ferocity with which she pursued her work in the face of massive resistance from her peers and bosses--is an incredible lesson in courage, conviction, and persistence. And now she’s made perhaps the most important discovery of the 21st century so far. Of course there’s selection bias at work here (lots of scientists throw their careers away refusing to quit unproductive research!) but it really is true that a lot of the most important things ever done or discovered, from Galileo to Turing to Kariko, were completed in the face of fierce, institutional resistance. “Don’t quit on what you believe in” remains excellent advice in terms of expected value, albeit with wide variance.
Here is a very in-depth New Yorker profile about Larry Gagosian, the most powerful art dealer in the world, a man of whom I had never heard until reading that profile but who seems to be a strange sort of ur-American, ur-Capitalist shark who uses a preternatural understanding of status and how to manipulate it as a means of controlling a huge piece of the world’s fine art market. Here is a Founder’s Podcast episode that sums up the article and draws some lessons from it that will take less time than the full text, but I’d recommend reading and then listening in that order.
That’s some of the best stuff I’ve found on the internet lately! Hope something caught your interest and improved your Sunday. Have an excellent week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story!