2025-11-26 21:12:12
Recently I've been getting into Gratitude Patrols. People talk about gratitude journals as being one of the few provably impactful psychological interventions [citation needed], but I think there's a benefit to physically embodying it by walking around your space each morning and thanking things.
If you have a larger space then making a goal of "go into every room and thank something" might make sense, or in a smaller space something like "walk around the entire perimeter and thank 6 objects along the way."
I find that the physical space presents great embodiments of a lot of the things I'm grateful for, and reminders of lots of small things I should be grateful for but usually forget to be. I thank my cooking appliances for the food I eat, I thank my pointless expensive items for the fact I'm rich enough to have some pointless expensive items, I thank my slippers for being slippers because I really really love slippers. I genuinely believe this improves my baseline happiness.
Sometimes I fall asleep while listening to an audiobook. I know I fell asleep because other people in the room tell me I was snoring. But I swear I heard the book the entire time, I didn't skip any of the story (though admittedly haven't tested this with a plot quiz afterwards). What is going on there?!?
A great way to sound authoritative is to say your opinion and then casually add "I'm speaking in a private capacity here, not on behalf of the President". This is factually accurate even (especially!) when there's no actual reason you might be speaking on behalf of the President.
2025-11-24 20:59:07
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Book Rec Survey, where I tried to gauge which books you were planning to read so I could rank my recommendations according to likeliness of being useful or relevant.
I found the survey results surprising and interesting: specifically, most of the books got ~80-90% responses of "never heard of it", which feels obvious in retrospect, but was not what I expected. There are so many books in the world that it's impossible for any of us to keep up; sometimes I walk into bookstores and have a nameless feeling of futile inadequacy, staring at the rows of shelves and knowing there are already more books than anyone could read in multiple lifetimes. (I believe some people feel this while gazing at the stars). So even with an audience of people who are (presumably) self-selected to share my interests and proclivities, most of our favourite books are just completely unknown to each other, which is (depending on your positivity) either tragic or an incredible opportunity.
I included two dummy recs in the survey to tease out how likely it was that people were actually reading the questions – I think all surveys should do this, despite the fact that there is 0 incentive or motivation to fake your answers on an unpaid book-thoughts survey. The results:
So, well done ATVBT readers for your honesty and accuracy in survey-responding.
Onwards! Here are the books I most-recommend for ATVBT readers, given my existing tastes and yours. You'll note that these books were published various numbers of years in the past; my general feeling is that I read too many new books because they're new, and I should spend more of my tragically limited reading-slots on books that are someone's all-time favourite already, regardless of when they were published.
A romance novel with surprisingly good psychological insights, 97% not-heard-of.
Many years ago I was working on a short story about two strangers who can't afford to live in New York, and so alternate space in a studio – he works nights and she works days, so they never meet, but soon they start leaving each other notes on the bedside table, until (of course! of course!) they fall in love. I wrote the beginning of this and showed it to a friend, and he didn't like it, so I quit, as I too-often do. I have thought occasionally about that story, and how nice it would be to finish it, because gosh-darn I love the premise and the book would be super cute. But, alas, I never got back to it.
To my surprise, many years later, Audible recommended me Beth O'Leary's Flatshare, a novel that tackles this exact premise, and does it infinitely better than I ever would have.
I mainly recommend this if you're 1) a nerdy, literary person, who 2) has never read a modern romance novel. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it; presumably there's a reason you've never read a romance novel, and perhaps that reason is that you know they're not for you. But I think this one manages to be a "true" representative of the genre (not a deconstructed upmarket reimagining) while also being an intelligent, well-constructed novel with good psychological depth.
A weird philosophical thought experiment novel, 87% not-heard-of.
The goddess Athene collects Plato-enthusiasts from throughout time and space and sends them back to Atlantis to try to build Plato's Republic.
If you want to be persuaded about this book it's more efficient for you to read this Ada Palmer review (some spoilers). Some people I've recommended it to didn't love it because they found it too thought-experimenty – I'm maybe ill-qualified to assess this because I tend to like philosofiction, but I thought the plot was pretty good as well.
Overall this is one of the novels I think of most often, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and felt like it changed how I thought: it has a genuinely new-to-me lens on how you might think about the human experience, and I think that's hard to convey and worth a lot.
76% heard-of, but only 1% planning-to-read.
This book is so good as a description of the decision whether to have kids or not. Perhaps it feels more like a series of meditations or aphorisms than a traditional novel, and I can imagine that it will be high variance and some of you would hate it, but surely it's better to read a high-variance book than a low-variance one? There were so many thoughts in this book that I've had and never discussed with anyone, and I do think one of the greatest things about novels is the James Baldwin quote:
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.
(The other great thing, of course, is when you read things that have never happened to you, things that happened to people in-some-way opposite to you, and come a little closer to understanding them).
Sally Rooney reviewed Motherhood in the LRB and wrote that she was reminded of the great Camus quote that
‘To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.’ Camus meant that the only serious philosophical problem was that of suicide; it seems to me that the most serious philosophical problem could equally be that of parenthood: to decide whether or not life is worth bringing into existence.
I am not making this book sound fun, exactly, but it was fun and profound, both.
Many of you had heard of this, but were not planning to read it, so let me pitch you: this book gave me the most succinct understanding of pride (in the sinful sense) I have ever gotten, and came as close as any novel has (though not quite managing) to make me fundamentally change my life. It felt more like an artwork or a theater performance, it stabbed me right between ribs, because 1) the people in it are their own worst enemies and making their own lives worse entirely unnecessarily, and 2) I could see so clearly how I was doing the same thing.
First and Last Men, by Olaf Stapledon – many of you were planning to read already. The only novel I know where the main characters are civilizations rather than individuals, very mind-expanding.
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford – many of you planning to read already. Incredibly immersive explorations of 1700s New York. I have one big critique of this book which makes me reluctant to recommend it, despite otherwise thinking it's 110% excellent, but I can't tell you what it is without spoilering, a tricky one.
Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis and Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Great great novels but already wide name-rec, you don't need me to tell you whether to read or not.
Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch. Magical detective series. TV show coming out soon and I would mildly bet that this will become a true global phenomenon (it has already sold 8 million copies, but 87% of you haven't heard of it, so).
Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi. A novel about Ghana and Nigeria but also about the American elite. Breathtaking. For a long time this was one of my unambiguously favourite novels and I have some deep personal lore with it, but I realised it's now been long enough since I read it that I don't feel like I2025 can recommend it. Have queued it for re-reading so I can fully recommend it again next year.
2025-11-21 20:58:36
The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the US (measured by units), up from 24% today.
ChinaTalk on acquisition reform.
Children need independent peer cultures. The Montessori-pilled in the audience will not be surprised.
Filed under “age as the next political battle ground”.
Thoughts on the future of autonomous vehicles.
Blake Scholl’s conversation with Tyler.
Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. Also, the top ten states for fertility are all red states; the bottom ten are all blue states (Vermont is last, chased by Oregon — London Review of Books.
The US mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation, more than 3x as many stars as there are in the Milky Way — Pennies Are Trash Now
60% of SF Unified School District 8th graders are not proficient in math.
I can’t remember where I saw this, but it resonated: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoiding the feeling of failure”
Gemini File Search API. I’ll be trying this one out.
Thoughts about code sandboxes.
2025-11-19 21:11:03
I want to give some end-of-year book recommendations, but I think it's most meaningful to recommend books that people haven't heard of (or wouldn't have read otherwise).
So I'm doing a little survey – basically it's a bunch of novels(ish) I might want to recommend, and will ask you if you've heard of them / plan to read them.
I will then combine this info with the strength of my feelings about them to generate recommendations that might actually sway someone's reading.
I'd be immensely grateful if you'd take 2 minutes to answer the questions here.
2025-11-17 22:23:13
I swear to goodness modern galleries have started using LEDs instead of incandescent lightbulbs, and that it has genuinely ruined a lot of the great wall-art of history.
This is exactly the type of complaint that people make as they get older and compare the memories of their youth, floating around them like helium balloons, with the heavy concrete of contemporary experience, so I would be 0% surprised if this turns out not to be true: either that I'm just misremembering how good the paintings looked the first time, or that the galleries are still using incandescent lightbulbs and I’m simply wrong about this factually.
But I have seen Picasso's Guernica N times in my life, and the first N-2 times were reproductions in books which made me think "eh, I don't get it," and the N-1th time was in person during the Incandescent Lightbulb Period Of History and genuinely made me weep, and the Nth time was in person under what I swear were LED lights, and which (I swear) made the painting look flat and tinny.
Surely we can afford to keep incandescent lights going in the settings where we need them? Or at least find LED lights with the light-profile of incandescents?
Actually this makes me wonder how many works of art I never appreciated because the type of light they were created in – either the natural light of a particular time or place, or candlelight, or whatever the artist was painting with – was not the light I saw them in. It's like how cave art was drawn to live in the flames of a bonfire, or how (surprisingly similarly) pixel art looks blocky to us now but was designed for CRT monitors that added a natural motion.
If you're looking at an artwork in the wrong light literally, you're also looking at it in the wrong light metaphorically, and in some sense you haven't actually seen it.
The piece that unlocked all of contemporary art for me was Carsten Höller's Test Site, a series of slides for grownups installed in a cavernous gallery that, while not strictly measureless, was truly incredibly big.
It was exactly the kind of artwork that gets roundly mocked as What Is Wrong With Contemporary Art, because adults in button-downs and fancy scarves going down big fairground slides is (admittedly) very funny, and the fact that these slides cost millions of dollars to commission and even more to maintain is very easy to mock.
But Test Site isn't actually about the slides, it’s about the feeling you have once you get to the end of the queue, and there's a 15 second moment when you are next up for it, and you don't really want to do it anymore – you're a 50 year old man in a suit, after all, and you suddenly remember being 5 years old and being scared of the slide, too, but the neighbor's kid (who was always braver than you) is shouting come on, go down already!, and you have to do it even though you don't want to, and 20 years later that's what happened with your marriage, too, you knew you didn't want to go through with it, but once you've stood in that metaphorical line for long enough you simply can't cut out, you know?, just what would the neighbors think, and that's how you found yourself in this exhausting stalemate with a woman whose resignation was ultimately worse than her anger, and who finally had the mercy to take the marriage out back and shoot it, which your friends (you are certain, in secret) all think is deeply humiliating, but to you was only a relief, because you would never be brave enough to make that decision, and now everybody is staring at you because it's been 30 seconds already and the line is bunching behind you, and they're getting annoyed because you're at Carsten Höller's Test Site, and they need you to go down the slide so that they can have gone down the slide, and then tell all their friends at brunch how silly it was, but you know what? let them mutter, let them be angry at you!, for once in your life you're choosing you. You turn around and look at them, these people who all your life have passively pushed you to do the things you didn't want to, and you throw your arms up at them in a gesture of defiance and freedom, which (in your minds eye, if not in reality) evokes that broken-winged bird taking flight, and you leave the line.
The artwork Test Site is not actually the slides, it's the feeling you get while standing in line for Test Site, that is the test and you are the site. It is a brilliant work of art even if it is also just a bunch of grown-ups going down a very expensive fairground slide.
In general, contemporary art is more likely to make sense (and be enjoyable) if you treat it less as what does this show and more as what internal experience is this meant to evoke in me? It should be judged not on what it shows but on how specifically, uniquely or intensely it can evoke certain experiences. A lot of it fails at this!, that is also true, but at least we should judge it on what it's meant for.
Much like books (and people), I think some art only makes sense if you meet it at the right time in your life. I don't want to turn into a full-on apologist for everything, I suspect some art (and books) really are just bad. But I try really hard to simultaneously hold in my head the ideas that "this piece of art feels like art-fraud, sight and fury signifying nothing" and "maybe I'm just not meeting it at the right time to understand it."
Much like the lighting issue, even great art will look bad in the wrong context. For example, I swear that the Rothko Chapel is a terrible setting for Rothkos, even though (embarrassingly for my thesis) Rothko himself designed it. (He died before the chapel opened, so I console myself that he would have changed it if he'd seen how he turned out, rather than needing to admit that I'm wrong).
By contrast, the Rothko Room at the Tate is one of the greatest and most profound human experiences I've ever encountered, up there with the Sagrada Familia and... probably a couple other things, but nothing that's coming to mind right now.
Again I don't want to claim that everything is good in the right context, it isn't, but only that there are a lot of complementary dimensions that need to go right for a piece to speak with you, and if it doesn't speak to you when you see it it doesn't necessarily mean the piece is bad.
One big problem with art-viewing is that if you're paying $30 (or lining up for an hour) to see a gallery, you feel like you want to get Good Value from it, and end up spending too much time there, and getting over-stuffed with art, and then not going again.
I suspect for me the ideal viewing time is about 30 minutes, so much of my art-exposure in life came from the few times I lived nearby to a very good, very free gallery I could dip in and out of.
I suspect the distribution of art in our world is highly suboptimal? There's tons of great art undisplayed, and tons of great art concentrated in a few overwhelming locations, and then lots of places without great art at all.
To the extent that there's any viable individual-level response to this, I guess it might be to go to a gallery for half an hour, then sit in the cafe for a couple of hours on your laptop, then go back out for a half-hour, and repeat. I have never actually done this.
My friend S thinks there should be a gallery with very exact replicas of some of the greatest pieces of art in history. I would be into this, and you could do it as a contemporary art exhibit, interrogating the validity of replicas vs originals.
I originally wanted to call this piece "X Thoughts about Modern Art," but Modern Art is technically from the 1860s to the 1970s.
It's crazy to me that the term "modern" will one day mean a specific period of time that is long into the past. We may even have crossed the threshold already where young people see Modern as something old-fashioned?, the same way that New York is extremely not-new, and New College even less so. Perhaps it’s just a mistake to ever name anything after its currentness, if you want it to last.
I'm sure when I was growing up there were people going "well ACTUALLY it's not Modern Art because it was made in 1980," but I also assume that most other people found this annoying. But it's now been 50 years since the Modern era ended, I guess it’s time to move on? We all go down the long slide, like free bloody birds.
2025-11-14 21:06:28
The Goon Squad:
Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.
This seems like an unsustainable equilibrium.
The K shaped economy. Think old vs. young rather than rich vs. poor.
Alaska experiments with voting by phone.
There’s been a ~20% reduction in the under 20 population between 1990 and 2024.
The largest newspaper in California by subscribers is the New York Times. Ezra Klein.
Walmart takes 25% of all SNAP dollars.
Chuck Klosterman: “All art ends when it reaches self awareness”
This seems so insane I have to try it. And the link to the GitHub.