2026-06-08 19:11:18
0) for some people, alcohol is addictive and life-derailing, to the point where I feel bad writing a post called Mixed Feelings About Alcohol. It's very hard to say this without sounding corny but if you think there's any chance you're one of those people, please talk to someone instead of reading this blogpost. I've had friends who've had good experiences with AA and there's also a drug you can take. I don't know nearly enough about either of these but just, like, please stop reading this and text someone to get the conversation started, or email me and I'll help you figure it out.
1) I generally think that a lot of life is about trying to avoid ruts, and that more people should try to shake their mental snowglobes more often. Alcohol is famous for reducing inhibitions, and in many ways I think that's good. Sometimes you need a stimulus to throw off the bowlines and sail away from the safe harbor, and maybe most ideally that stimulus would be I listened to my small still inner voice and realized in a balanced way that I should ask out Jo, but since realistically that is hard for many of us, it's helpful that there's a substance that greatly increases the chances you will ask out Jo.
2) But shaking the snowglobe isn't risk-free. You really might do something stupid, or regrettable, and I don't think there's any way around that: we build up these protective shells for a reason, and breaking the shell will always be a risk, even if sometimes it's a risk worth taking. (E.g. I have mixed feelings about therapy in part because it seems obvious to me that any activity which can make you dump your boyfriend / quit your job / leave your hometown is obviously a high-risk, high-reward proposition. But that's for another day).
3) Even without great confessions, alcohol's inhibition-lowering has a useful social function as a kind of trust mechanism. I think this is (one reason) why business deals were historically sealed over raucous drinking sessions: if you get incredibly drunk with someone and the worst thing you discover is that they can't sing for s**t, you have some information that they're not hiding anything business-relevant from you. On the other hand, if the drinking causes their loose lips to say they can't believe you were willing to pay $— for this project, nobody else was willing to pay even one-fourth that, maybe you're ready to ghost the deal.
This function is useful, both in professional and personal settings! And it's hard to replace sans spirits: late nights? mutual friends? seeing what they do when things go wrong? None of these are exactly analogous.
4) One of my long-time hobby-horses is that we misunderstand history because successful moral revolutions (abolition, women's suffrage) are remembered as moral revolutions, but failed moral revolutions are remembered as.... weird historical quirks, or something, even though they would have been remembered as moral revolutions if they'd succeeded.
As a result, we think of moral revolutions as more "inevitable" than they really are, and more likely to abide. But this isn't true, and the shining example of that is Prohibition in the United States, which was understood in its own time as the next great moral frontier – explicitly in the mold of abolition – that would save the widow and the orphan and bring light to the darkness.
My mixed feelings about alcohol go so far as to think that we might all be better off if alcohol were indeed abolished. And yes it's different to have a society with No X than to personally boycott X, but still it's weird to be in the position of "in many ways I think this thing is good for me – not just enjoyable but actually good – but also I wonder if it should be banned, and wouldn't be shocked if future generations see it as evil."
5) For moderate drinkers, the health effects of alcohol seem to be mediated by its negative effects on sleep. These effects are greatly reduced by drinking earlier in the day – with a half life of 4 or 5 hours, every drink you have at 2pm should be about 1/4 as impactful on your sleep as a drink at midnight, and I suspect it's more extreme than this because of added effects of alcohol-driven dehydration or compensatory overhydration. The old saw says not to drink before 5pm, and the other old saw says it's always 5pm somewhere, but I wonder if a better norm would be never drink after 5pm in your timezone. (Yes this is incompatible with a 9-5 job, but equally I'm fine with saying "only drink on holidays, and even then only in the daytime")
6) How famous is the If By Whiskey speech amongst youse? Anyway, I think it's very good; mixed feelings about alcohol from 1952:
I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey....
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together...; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows.... then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
2026-06-05 19:11:09
I've been thinking lately about how many years I've spent reading things from the internet, and how few of them I remember. So I'm continuing a little series on Pieces Of Internet Writing That Have Actually Stuck With Me.
Next up: Tim Tebow Chronicles, by Jon Bois. (Heads up that a lot of this review is self-plagiarized from myself ~4 years ago).
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This is a weird one, in that 1) it stuck with me for form rather than content reasons, 2) it had blended in my mind with Bois' other sprawling internet-piece 17776, 3) I can't remember the content of either of them specifically, beyond a general sense that they're about a post-work future and people playing absurd continent-spanning games of neo-football, and 4) yet I still do think about them, and the project they embody, both for "what could writing on the internet look like, in all its damaged glory?" and also "what will we do with our time in a post-work future?", which are also related.
There's a story (that I have never fact-checked and yet assume is true) about how in the early days of television the producers just set up a camera and pointed it at people who were basically performing radio dramas. And then it took years for people to ask (and answer): what can we do on screen that's native to this medium, rather than importing the assumptions of the old medium, now that we're free of its constraints?
It's kind of crazy to me 1) how rarely internet writing is formally inventive, 2) how in practice people don't SEEM to want that very much?, and when writers/publishers bring out weird interesting formats readers generally aren't (I think) very interested?
Anyway. I'm in a weird spot where I'm writing about this as A Story I Still Think About, and I do think it's thematically relevant for the fast-approaching Lumière train of AI, and yet I can't exactly recommend reading it, unless you have a vast amount of time on your hands (appropriate to the theme) and/or are extremely interested in these particular topics. The Chronicles felt long, to me, and its thesis felt basically summarised by this short bit in the middle:
I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.
Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.
Basically, Bois is ambling towards a kind of David Chapman-esque philosophy: the games we play have meaning even though we create that meaning ourselves. See also:
There is no one to cheer us on in these final days. When we score our touchdown, there will be no scorekeeper. No one will see us score the grandest goal in the history of sports.
Volquez: But I guess this game isn't really about that, is it?
Tebow: I guess not.
Volquez: We're players, but we're also spectators to all this wonder. The cities, the valleys, the ancient crater. And these mountains. They're gorgeous.
And also:
You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.
We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.
It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.
Humans cannot endure in a future without problems. It's not in us. Sports invent problems as nothing else can.
My issue philosophically with The Tim Tebow Chronicles is (incidentally) the issue I had with the TV show The Good Place: they want to make claims about a world with no external arbiters, where meaning is meaningful even though it doesn't have any truly objective grounding. (Cf David Chapman again, who is trying to make this work in Meaningness, which I admire but also find very hard to read).
But this goal is incredibly, extremely, even-more-synonyms-for-very hard to do to anyone's satisfaction. So both Bois and the Good Place writers pull a kind of bait-and-switch, subbing in a series of external arbiters and escalating authority figures who can give the characters their Gold Stars For Being Good.
This is exactly the problem though: your philosophy claims that there is no external authority who can give you that gold star! The whole point is that we have to endow our own meaning!
I am bothered by this bait-and-switch, and hope I'm misunderstanding both authors/creators, but... if I'm misunderstanding them, I don't understand what I'm not understanding, etc.
2026-06-04 19:11:38
Is This Anything? was a long running series I did on this blog, and I guess I'm now reviving. It's named after the thing standup comics say when testing out new, rough material. Arguably most of the blog is already that, but this is even more so.
I have what's best described as a destructive but passionate on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter. A lot of people like to talk about Twitter as a "hellsite" that they hate (but keep using?) and I'm like: no, my problem is exactly that I love going on Twitter, it hacks my brain and is bad for me, but I obviously love being there.
I'm currently in yet-another attempt to get away from it by using a site-blocking extension which allows you to set rules like "do not let me on this site more than 10 mins out of every 30" or whatever. Unfortunately, it turns out "10 mins out of every 30" is not a good rule for me: it somehow makes the behaviour more addictive, I guess because it has this kind of intermittent variable rewards property where sometimes I log on and I'm allowed to read it, and sometimes I log on and I'm not, and sometimes the site blocks while I'm using it, but I also know it's only ~20 mins till I can get back on. This is all really bad honestly, and while I haven't tracked this accurately at all I worry it's making me use Twitter more on net than I was before. Can anybody help, please?
Most airport restaurants (famously) suck, but Atlanta airport has bizarrely many 4.9* rated outlets, include multiple reviews saying (approximately) "this restaurant would be great anywhere, to find it in an airport is basically a miracle." I'm planning to investigate this but if any of you know the reason already please tell me why.
[in other words: what's the deal with airport food?]
When is it true or not that the hardest part is getting started, so just do SOMETHING to get the ball rolling? I sometimes want to suggest that people who are procrastinating/avoiding something take literally any action in a relevant direction, because doing anything will get you started and you can go from there. But I'm not sure this is true in general, sometimes you're avoiding/procrastinating for good reason (as I have learned the hard way), and so taking a random action might not be a good idea. E.g. someone has been deliberating for a while between different career paths and as a result is not getting anywhere, part of me wants to say ok let me help you put in a job application, what's the easiest application we can do?, it doesn't matter which because you just need to get that ball rolling. But I'm not sure that's always true, or how you'd predict when it is/isn't true.
Sometimes when people talk at me I find myself thinking – I'm sorry – either you think I'm stupid or you are stupid. Do any of you have this experience? Is there any way to figure out which?
2026-06-03 19:11:51
Do you want to be in a Fermi Estimates club with me? Reply to this email.
I'm really not sure at this point which ideas from behavioral economics are actually true, and which are just specious. But if the idea of endowment effects is real (and broadly applicable), much of the advice in the world is wrong.
"Endowment Effects" is the idea that we value something more because its ours. The classic experiment is to give one person a pen and another person a mug, and ask them if they want to swap. Supposedly, almost-nobody ever wants to swap, even though they were randomly allocated either a pen or a mug, and the only reason they should consistently value their thing more is because it is theirs.
But this effect would (I think) trouble a lot of common advice. E.g. "it's not the winning that counts, it's taking part" – in most competitions, most people lose and few people win. If endowment effects make us (over)value what we have, possibly winning does count, but the rest of us trick ourselves into believing that the participation trophy we have is as good as the winner's trophy we lack. And this applies to any domain where few people do X, and the advice-givers are likely to be from among the many who didn't. It doesn't require that anyone be lying or (as the kids say) coping, just that they're irrationally attached to the thing they have.
2026-06-02 19:11:20
One of my favourite words is deliberate: I long to live more of my life deliberately.
E.g. I'm fascinated by the coffee hobbyist community. People like James Hoffman make these wildly specific, wildly popular videos dialling in every element of the coffee-making process: how many grams of beans, how small should you grind them? How many grams of water, and at what temperature? Along the way he blind-tastes the results of all these tiny experiments and figures out which procedure gives the best coffee outcome.
I don't personally have sufficiently specific coffee taste to do this myself – if a cup of coffee is Good Enough that's good enough for me. But it's important to note the spillover benefits from the coffee hobby community to myself: their optimization of the 100% perfect coffee makes my 80/20 coffee miles better. I can easily buy high-quality beans now because other people care a lot about getting the best beans, and I can easily buy a $35 dripper that makes really good coffee and is extremely forgiving of half-assed preparation methods, all because somebody else cared to live deliberately.
Similarly, one of the great transformations of my understanding of cooking was when some combination of Samin Nosrat and my famous coblogger Jehan showed me how to cook deliberately: you make a thing, then add salt, then taste, then add more, then taste, then add more, etc. Then maybe you can write down what you did, and next time you cook the same dish you can pay attention to what you're doing differently, and slowly stumble towards a more perfect bouillon.
A non-deliberate chef might implicitly run 1 or even 0 experiments each time they cook, while a deliberate chef is effectively running 10 or more, and noticing the results. Over the course of a year that's thousands more pieces of feedback, which often compound and combine, and (at least for me) the upshot is both tastier food and a more immersive, enjoyable experience of cooking it.
So far I've been talking about deliberate in a kind of analytically-minded continuous-improvement way that I know not all of you love. But as some of you will already have noticed, I stole the phrase from the transcendant Henry David Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
As is too often the case, I have not in fact read Thoreau past a few great quotes, although I did visit Walden Pond and had a lovely time there. But what I like about deliberate is that you can live deliberately in an intuitive way, as well as an analytic one. If you'll forgive me a second quote from a person I haven't read properly, but who influenced me a lot anyhow, the poet-politician (not a coincidence) Aime Cesaire once wrote: Above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator. Because life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.
Ironically – or cosmically-fittingly – deliberate [adj] contains its own downfall, deliberate [verb]: you can deliberate your way out of doing anything at all, deliberate or otherwise.
2026-06-01 19:11:27
As a policy, I don't "name names" on this blog. If I'm speaking about anyone negatively (or in a way that might be perceived as negative), I will generally refer to them in an abstracted and anonymzed form. The reason is basically just a cost-benefit analysis, and here's how it works:
My sense is that there is a high fixed cost to ever criticizing someone by name: if it reaches them or their fans, they are likely to be annoyed. There's also some variable costs, because e.g. if you keep criticizing someone over time then it's more likely to reach them, but my sense is that most of the cost comes as a high fixed cost for the first time you make the criticism.
Meanwhile, I think the benefits of "naming names" are mostly small and cumulative. I don't think most readers will notice or remember a throwaway critique, or weight it very heavily in future, unless you either write a long and detailed takedown or ceterum censeo at every opportunity.
As a result, I think the balance of cost/benefits as a writer stack heavily towards only naming names for criticisms if it's a person or group you're really serious about criticizing, and intend to criticize repeatedly over time. If you're just mentioning in passing someone or something that has annoyed you, I don't think it's in your interests as a writer to name them, even if not-naming makes your writing a little less clear and punchy as a result.
I'm not sure how I feel about this from a civic-minded perspective, maybe the world is worse because most people aren't willing to call out most other people because the benefits are diffuse and go to other people, and the costs are concentrated and go to you. But so it goes, if this is a collective action problem then I guess I'm part of the problem.
Incidentally, I think this is why there are swarms of Culture War writers who spend all their time critiquing The Opposition: they were already not going to be friends with the opposition, and already don't care if the opposition's fans are mad at them, and having paid the cost of engaging the bear it makes sense for them to keep poking that bear ad infinitum. Examples of people who do this and who are i.m.o. bad include [lol of course I'm not going to name them].