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What I'm listening to (July 2024)

Backfired: The Vaping Wars I'm a huge fan of Leon Neyfakh and Prologue Projects, whose shows are always worth listening to. Their latest, an Audible Original that requires an Audible subscription, is a fascinating dive into the history of e-cigarettes and vaping. As usual, the show is very

Reading: The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived

IBM’s contributions to the history of computing are currently underrated, probably because their recent performance has been so bad. But this fascinating book covers so much that’s worth understanding and celebrating. First, Thomas Watson Sr.’s mastery of the tabulating market of the early 20th century, including the

Reading: Table for Two

Amazon.com: Table for Two: Fictions eBook : Towles, Amor: Kindle StoreAmazon.com: Table for Two: Fictions eBook : Towles, Amor: Kindle StoreFollow I didn’t understand the structure of this book—six unrelated short stories, and one novella with some characters from Rules of Civility—till well after I was inside

Dwarkesh Podcast

I love Conversations with Tyler, and often think — where are the other CWT-like podcasts? Turns out Dwarkesh Podcast is one of them. Dwarkesh Podcast | Dwarkesh Patel | SubstackDeeply researched interviews https://link.chtbl.com/dwarkeshDwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Patel One of the things I love most about CWT is that Tyler doesn’t

Re-reading Zero to One

I’ve been on a kick of re-reading books—both fiction and non-fiction. This one made a big impression on me back when it was a series of blog posts by Blake Masters. Though some of the predictions haven’t worked out (AI has a greater impact than Thiel predicts

Reading: Genius Makers

This is a worthwhile short history of AI and deep learning, focused around the humans (Minsky, Hinton, et al) who brought us its top advances. Probably not earth-shattering for folks deep in the field, but entertaining and sets up a decent overview of the personalities involved. Skip the sections on

Listening: Danish String Quartet

I had the privilege of seeing the Danish String Quartet recently at Zankel Hall with my friend Jesse—the first time I’d seen a string quartet in person. They played Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, which I’d never heard before. It’s a beautiful piece with

Listening: Nicholas Bostrom on EconTalk

Enjoying this conversation with Nick Bostrom on his new book Deep Utopia. Bostrom asks: in a world where AI can do anything and everything, and we can develop drugs to make us feel anything artificially (e.g. the feeling of being sated, the feeling and effects of a workout), what

Listening: Benjamin Moser with Tyler Cowen

CWT has been my favorite podcast for years. There are runs where each conversation is transcendent—for example when Tyler interviewed both Karl Ove Knausgaard and Margaret Atwood in back-to-back episodes. There are other times where I’m almost completely unable to connect with the guest or the subject matter.

Reading: "Murderous nurse" Lucy Letby in the New Yorker

I found this New Yorker longread super-troubling, especially with this setup early on: The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the