Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2025, science fiction, 445 pages. I’d heard people say this was basically a better Alien Clay, but I felt the two books were quite different (and I liked both). Interesting ideas as usual. My fear of spoiling anything renders me mute beyond that.
\nSupreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen, published 2020, history, 498 pages. Good book, though frustrating throughout because of the court’s frequent decisions in favor of the rich and powerful instead of normal people, and also because of slimy, underhanded tactics by Nixon and McConnell and others. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this, but still it stung. More and more, conservativism seems these days to me to be a blight that rots whate’er it touches and in many ways is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Saying this as someone who grew up fairly conservative.)
\nThe White Album, by Joan Didion, published 1979, essays, 223 pages. Still loving Didion’s writing, about any topic. Liked this: a “place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”
\nThe Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, published 1597, play, 96 pages. Rather liked it — lots of great lines. Fun (if “fun” is the right word for a tragedy) (it’s not) to read it after reading Ovid on Pyramus and Thisbe. Also, it hits quite a bit differently now that I have teenagers around the age of Romeo and Juliet.
Alan Jacobs on the Industrial Revolution. “I have mixed but largely unfavorable views of the rise of industrial society, but what prevents my views from being wholly negative is my fascination with and admiration for the enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution.” And that sewage pumping station!
\nBrad East on how AI changes us. “The relevant questions to ask about AI and any and all usage of the variety of tools that go under its name are moral, theological, and formational. What kind of person is it likely to make me to be? What virtues or vices will it develop or diminish? In what ways is it likely to expand and enrich my (our) humanity—the good life—and in what ways is it unlikely to do so?” An angle I haven’t seen mentioned nearly enough.
\nJohn Scalzi’s thoughts on AI. Liked this.
\nJuha-Matti Santala on having different notebook sizes for different ideas. I like this. Lately I’ve been all-in on Field Notes, but I still have other sizes of notebooks (including other sizes of Field Notes) and have been trying to figure out how I want to use them.
\nMaxime Heckel on halftone shaders. Fun.
JB Pritzker’s State of the State address. Quite liked this. “I know, right now, there are a lot of people out there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that. I also know that love unrequited can break a heart made fragile by dashed hope. Which is why it’s important for me to stand before you today and tell you that your country is loving you back — just not in the way you are used to hearing.”
\nBob Nystrom on knitting. “Let’s say that, like me, you are a person who stares at a computer and writes code for a living. As a straight male who grew up in a time where knitting was very strongly female coded, it for the most part never occurred to me that knitting was a thing I could do and might enjoy. Regardless of your demographic categories and background, it’s possible that you have also not really considered knitting. This article exists to get you to do so. Specifically, I’ll try to convince you, one software person to another, why it might be a good fit for your life and brain. This is a pitch for knitting, but—for better or worse—an extremely nerdily argued one.” I read this, promptly bought a needle and yarn, and spent an hour learning how to knit. (Have I done anything with it since then? Um, no. But someday soon I hope to get back into it.)
\nHenrik Karlsson on political power and Robert A. Caro’s books. “But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.”
\nMarcin Wichary on Flickr’s URL scheme, which had a strong influence on me back in the day.
\nWm Morris on the current opportunity for Latter-day Saint writers. “There are pockets of interesting Mormon culture happening everywhere. And the lack of a true center for it limits material resources and access to audience, but also liberates artists from the slim hope of wide acclaim and the imprimatur of respectability.” I found this inspiring.
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough, published 2016, history, 814 pages. I’d had no idea there was a rash of bombings throughout the ’70s and had never heard of Weatherman or FALN or the SLA before this. It’s bonkers. Good book, though in the course of reading it I realized that maybe I don’t actually like reading about criminals all that much. (Or at least drugged-up violent ones.)
\nWar and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude), published 1869 (translation published 1922), fiction, 2,175 pages. Very long, clearly, but oh so good, and most of the chapters are only a few pages long which helped a lot. I liked the translation, too. Lots of Tolstoy pontificating about history and military theory, with a little bit of math (calculus! actual equations!) thrown in for seasoning. The only part that felt like a slog to me was the second epilogue, but that’s probably because I was excited to cross the finish line.
\nJournals of Dorothy Wordsworth volume 1, by Dorothy Wordsworth (edited by William Knight), published 1897, diary, 309 pages. Enjoyed this. It takes place in the Lake District and in Scotland and among other things is full of nature descriptions (like “the ivy twisting round the oaks like bristled serpents,” for a very short example), lots of walking around (and even after reading that, you are probably still underestimating just how much walking around there is in this journal), Coleridge not being well, and her brother William writing poetry. I think I enjoyed the Scotland trip the most. This resonated with me as a fellow diarist: “I have neglected to set down the occurrences of this week, so I do not recollect how we disposed of ourselves to-day.” I’ll leave you with this story: “The wife was very generous, gave food and drink to all poor people. She had a passion for feeding animals. She killed a pig with feeding it over much. When it was dead she said, ‘To be sure it’s a great loss, but I thank God it did not die clemmed’ (the Cheshire word for starved).”
\nEugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin (translated by Henry Spalding), published 1837 (translation published 1881), poetry, 140 pages. I knew nothing about this going in; I’d heard Pushkin’s name but that was it. Found it interesting enough, with some compelling characterization, but I didn’t love it.
Kristie De Garis on the misplaced desire to find a system that makes writing faster. “Speed is an industrial value. It belongs to assembly lines, logistics, and shareholders, it is a measure designed to optimise throughput. When speed becomes the dominant value in writing, something fundamental shifts and something fundamental is lost.” And this: “When speed becomes the focus, writing will tend toward already established shapes, simply because those shapes are easier to produce.” Slow is not an enemy.
\nJason Gorman on how coding is not necessarily the most productive part. This line especially resonated with me: “And if we’re producing code faster than we can validate it — either by exploring the problem ourselves, or learning from user feedback if our release cycles are fast enough — then we’re piling assumptions on top of assumptions.”
\nJeremy Keith on frontend libraries and frameworks and LLMs. “Is it really all that different? With npm you dialled up other people’s code directly. With large language models, they first slurp up everyone’s code (like, the whole World Wide Web), run a computationally expensive process of tokenisation, and then give you the bit you need when you need it. In a way, large language model coding tools are like a turbo-charged npm with even more layers of abstraction.”
\nMarcin Wichary on Roger Wong’s post about Anthropic’s findings that using AI to write software seems to lead to less understanding of the code. Which makes sense, at least to me.
\nElizabeth Goodspeed on analogue creative work. “As a longtime fan of all things analogue, I should be thrilled. There have always been contemporary artists committed to doggedly tactile work – more of them would be even better! But when I look closely at much of the purportedly handmade work floating around these trend reports, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is made by hand at all.” I don’t try to pass my digital art off as being actually handmade, but trying to make digital pieces look analogue? Guilty. Very guilty. For me it’s been a matter of convenience and familiarity and back pain, but more and more I find myself wanting to make real things instead, physical things. Maybe 2026 will be the year where I finally make the leap. Also, I love Goodspeed’s “doggedly tactile” phrase, which I’m taking as a reminder that making things by hand is good, hard work.
Eleanor Robins on memorization as an act of resistance. Loved this. “The premise of the memory club is that bringing stories and poems to live inside our bodies might be an act of resistance. Originally, I thought of this as a resistance against AI—against the invitation to outsource our very thinking to the large-language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence, which are essentially externalised memory banks. By internalising the things we wanted to know deeply, I hoped we might bring at least some of this meaning-making back into human hearts and heads.”
\nScott Shambaugh on how an AI agent blogged a hit piece on him after he turned down a matplotlib pull request from the agent. Apparently innocuous intentions aside, I worry how much damage and chaos these agents are going to cause across the internet.
\nSophie Koonin on AI-generated code. “As I see more and more people generating code instead of writing it, I find myself wondering why engineers are so ready and willing to do away with one of the good bits of our jobs (coding) and leave themselves with the boring bit (reviews).”
\nSecrets of Privacy on ads in AI chatbots. Disturbing. Yet another reason to avoid LLMs.
\nJoe Crawford on how we’re in a web renaissance now. And it’s a wonderful thing. Visiting people’s personal websites is, for me, so much more delightful than social networks ever were.
JA Westenberg on failure. “I’ve started to think the whole framing is wrong. We’ve been so busy rehabilitating failure that we forgot to ask whether ‘failure’ is even the right word for what’s happening when you try something and it doesn’t work.” The experimental lens is a good way to approach it, I think.
\nRaptitude on covering your twenty-five miles and then resting up. I read this and liked it a lot — this is how you do big things — and then some time later as I was nearing the end of War and Peace I came across the original passage, which was fun.
\nJames Brown on what makes programming great. Liked this.
\nMatheus Lima on life happening at 1x speed. While I think this is good advice — efficiency often has downsides, and slowing down can enhance the quality of one’s experience — I do also think some things can be consumed at a slightly faster clip without lossiness, and sometimes the qualitative changes that accompany the speed increase are worth it, at least in my experience with reading.
\nAlex Harri’s deep dive into rendering higher-quality ASCII art. Fun. Using the shape of the characters to effectively bump up the resolution seems so obvious in retrospect.
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick, published 2007, nonfiction, 101 pages. Liked it, especially the process-oriented design angle, and in what should not have been a surprise to me, reading about that process of designing architecture stirred up a bit of nostalgia for days long past when I was a UX designer.
\nThe Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, by John le Carré, published 2016, nonfiction, 377 pages. Interesting enough, though it probably would have been better if I’d read some of le Carré’s books first, given that it’s mostly stories from later in his life with notes on how some of them served as inspiration for various characters or scenes in his novels.
\nA Short Autobiography of Countess Sophie Andreyevna Tolstoy, by Sophie Andreyevna Tolstoy (translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf), published 1922, nonfiction, 105 pages. Enjoyed the parts about Tolstoy writing War and Peace (which I finished reading yesterday!) and Anna Karenina. I didn’t know much about the Tolstoys’ lives beforehand, so color me sad when I got to the end and read (both from Sophie’s side in the main text and from Tolstoy’s side in the footnotes) about their marriage falling apart and all the strife about the will and Tolstoy’s determination to put all of his works into the public domain.
\nThe Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book, by William Morris (edited by William S. Peterson), published 1982, nonfiction, 117 pages. An interesting bit of book history by and about William Morris and Kelmscott Press. I’m far more minimalist than Morris and I don’t hate Bodoni like he does, but I do quite like his editions, and he remains an inspiration to me — particularly the part where he designed his own type. Someday!
Terence Eden’s small collection of text-only websites. Fun. Reminds me of Gemini (the protocol, not Google’s slop machine), which I still think about though I haven’t yet done anything with it. If any of you have, let me know! I’d love to hear about it.
\nStand with Minnesota. I meant to post this weeks ago. I cannot wait until Stephen Miller is gone — not to mention our criminal-in-chief and all his other cronies — and I hope ICE is brought to heel soon. (I do try to keep these link posts from veering political all the time, but goodness, these are not ordinary times.)
\nJohn Gruber on the names they call themselves. “‘Fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ weren’t slurs that were applied to them by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves, and their names became universally recognized slurs because the actions and beliefs of the Fascists and Nazis were universally recognized as reprehensible and evil. And because they lost.”
\nBrandon Sanderson on the hidden cost of AI art and how artmaking changes us. “The purpose of writing all those books in my earlier years wasn’t to produce something I could sell, it was to turn me into someone who could create great art. It took an amateur and it made him a professional. I think this is why I rebel against AI art products so much: because they steal the opportunity for growth from us.”
\nBhaskar Mitra on AI madness and leaving Big Tech because of “an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of those in Big Tech who want to deliberately enact (or, at least, are incapable of imagining anything other than) a techno-fascist future.” Yep.
\nBaldur Bjarnason on LLMs. Particularly the list of downsides. (If it feels like these link posts are becoming anti-AI all the time, by the way, you’re not wrong. The hype is ridiculous and needs to be deflated, and I believe there are serious risks that are being glossed over much of the time. But I also don’t want the overall feel of this blog to skew negative, so after this I may take a break from linking to AI posts, at least for a little while.)
\nRobin Sloan on flood fill vs. the magic circle. Enjoyed this take on how even if AI continues to proliferate, it still won’t affect everything in life. “A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.”
\nMarcin Wichary on Switch Angel making a trance track in Strudel. Enjoyed both the video (wow!) and Wichary’s commentary, and dang, Strudel is intriguing.
\nNeil Sainsbury on mathematics for the self-learner, with book recommendations. After reading through the list, I immediately ordered four of the Dover editions. Read at your own risk!
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by William Godwin, published 1798, nonfiction, 99 pages. One of the biographies mentioned in This Long Pursuit, it’s Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband writing after she died (just six months post-wedding) about her life. Quite good, short read, felt very human. Sad at the end, of course, with a fair amount of detail on Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth.
\nThin Air: A Ghost Story, by Michelle Paver, published 2016, horror, 161 pages. Read this for book group. It’s creepy and triggered my fear of heights. Not sure how I feel about the ending, though. A little abrupt, perhaps.
\nThe Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham-Jones, published 2025, horror, 504 pages. Though horror isn’t really my thing, I quite liked this, particularly the title (which is what drew me in in the first place) and the triple layers of nesting and the diary format. Recommended if you like horror.
\nA Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, by Thomas Mallon, published 1984, nonfiction, 293 pages. As one who loves reading diaries (published diaries, to be clear) and has kept one for the last several decades, I found this compelling and ate it up. Came out of it with a long list of books I now want to read. I also realized it’s been a very long while since I actually spent time reading any diaries (or letter compilations), so I’m working on remedying that.