Springtime Links: jellyfish lightning, giving birth at 74, and more
Working and feeling awe in strange times
Many of us have gotten too irreverent, I think. Lots of what I’ve been enjoying the most amid the Canadian winter’s dying gasps has acted as a tonic for that. The world’s so beautiful and complex—we can at least revere ir.
Ben Sasse, former US senator and a smiling dignant boulder against the violent seas, is interviewed by Ross Douthat on Day 72 of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Beautiful, so funny, too.
‘I Didn’t Know I Could Feel This Way’ by Freddie DeBoer. Just as beautiful. On life not death, though some of that. It swells the heart.
The 17-year mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin’s, identity gets solved by John Carreyrou in the NYT, who goes to El Salvador to confront him with the evidence.
There are these ‘transient luminous events’ that occur above thunder storms and they beggar belief. They’re also just one section of this masterwork video covering the world’s strangest lightning.
Joe Heath introducing the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, who passed last month and is the philosopher most held up alongside Rawls as the great political thinker of the past fifty years. “Like many Germans of his generation, his work was haunted by the specter of totalitarianism. In Habermas’ specific interpretation this took two forms, which we can think of as Orwell’s nightmare and Kafka’s nightmare.”
And speaking of John Rawls, a fable/short story…
Conan O’Brien goes on The Rest is History and breezes through the full story of The Beatles with Tom Holland, both of them sitting inside Abbey Road, in 90 minutes.
Only a small number of people (~15% of quality grads) should take up the EA project of ‘earning to give’.
Erramatti Mangamma gave birth at age 74(!) to twins(!!) - from a very good and warm Works in Progress article on the underrated efficacy of freezing your eggs.
‘Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English’ [CWT] - my favourite in a while.
And Henry Oliver on how he memorizes poetry, a practice I can happily recommend.
The story of the airman being rescued from Iran. Bound to be a movie at some point, and these writers doubtlessly have the best beat at the Times.
In awe of this peak propaganda coming from Tehran. So well done.
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times The Right To Giant Congress (6,641 representatives, to be exact). And our piece from the archives on the perils of electoral reform.1
We wrote about prediction markets and defended their epistemic value, but declined to uncover in those pieces the most thrilling market I’ve ever seen: Bitcoin Up or Down in the Next 5 Minutes?
Approximately one year ago we blogged about the possibility we are living through the Hinge of History. As Dylan Matthews writes, ‘The AI people have been right a lot’ and the plateau view considered in the article today seems pretty untenable.
A 7-minute study in rhetoric, which is much neglected these days.
The wisdom of Robert Frost, here on video.
Include the ‘State School Upper Middle Class’ in your models.
Kagan and Alito on why we shouldn’t bring video into the Supreme Court. This house agrees. People act differently on camera. You can listen to all of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments with an annotated transcript on screen here (this channel is a big public good).
514-415 by Bells Larsen. A folk song, I guess? And the acoustic version, which is how I prefer it performed. This song has a fascinating backstory to discover.
Let flood green into the heart’s fresh gaps;
Refill ambition and the body it saps.
I was lucky enough to attend the Liberal Party of Canada’s national convention and was very pleased to see them vote down proportional representation. Apparently us skeptics are the silent majority.