Things I read and enjoyed in May

Lightness, learning, last words, Levines, linear algebra, life goals

1. “Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.” -Aldous Huxley, Island

2. How might we learn? by Andy Matuschak. Masterful.

3. Rilke: a hunger drives us.

4. Jacob Trefethen says: No more strep throat! On the quest for a vaccine.

5. Rob Wiblin on what he’s learned about caring for an infant.

6. CS Lewis on grief: “Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

   

7. Haus of Decline: how I prefer to eat.

8. Japanese death poems.

   I cast the brush aside—

   from here on I’ll speak to the moon

   face to face.

9. Brad Frost praises the genre of people hearing music for the first time.

10. Henrik Karlsson on having more interesting ideas.

11. Tyler Cowen asks "Why does Houston produce so few intellectuals?" and Houston resident (and friend of Experience Machines) Charlie Schaub answers.

12. A former self-loather’s guide to actually building habits.

13. Ozy Brennan on the life goals of dead people. “Corpses don’t hurt anyone or anger people or fail or make mistakes or break rules. Corpses don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t possibly have feelings that are inappropriate or annoying. Once funeral arrangements have been made, corpses rot peacefully without burdening anyone.”

14. Build a self-reinforcing life; “ensure that the energy you expend in one area feeds another”.

15. William Buckner on the history and anthropology of diss tracks: “Independent hunter-gatherer societies from all over the world have used diss songs in the midst of their conflicts”

16. It’s crazy that both of these things could be true, but: sometimes things are regulated too much, but other times things aren’t regulated enough.

17. Keith Frankish on the ethical implications of illusionism about consciousness.

18. Michael Nielsen on “the real world”. Related: Michael Nielsen answers Tyler Cowen on whether the status of linear algebra is rising, “I don’t care.”

19. Writers who make the mundane fascinating: Matt Levines for subjects besides finance.

20. Ned Block reviews Christof Koch’s book on consciousness: “in many ways a mind-expanding book, but it is ultimately a parochial approach to theories of consciousness”

21. Richard Yetter-Chappell outlines a non-fungible hedonism.

22. Adam Mastroianni on how to get 7th graders to smoke.

23. A recent outrage shows that American voters care about animals! Sometimes. Matthew Adelstein points out: “If you're opposed to [Kristi] Noem killing a dog, you should be opposed to the systematic torture of tens of billions of animals on factory farms”.

24. A review of Saddam Hussein’s romance novel (!) that I didn’t know I needed.

25. Peter Wildeford’s quarterly review template.