Wife: What’d you get in that huge box? Me:

What is the oldest book you own?

No Country for Corporate Memphis

yeah sex is great but have you ever stepped into the MIT Press bookstore in Kendall Square with some money burning a hole in your pocket

a smooth brain encounters less friction

jack dorsey's flickr page is still up and it's this incredible time capsule from 2006/2007

moby dick is a book about a startup

Washington, Washington Twelve stories high, made of radiation The present beware, the future beware He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming

CORMAC MCCARTHY: He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. JOE ROGAN: sure. I've met guys like that

guys who read seeing like a state and decided that they wanted to be the state

raising my kids right

been trying to get 4o to apply a norman rockwell filter to 2000s nostalgia and it is turning up some nice results

big following, poor epistemics, can’t lose

With the decline in the influence of social media and the rise of the groupchat, we are probably operating in the twilight of the big, public kayfabe brawler as the apex predator of media

Just learned about this wild period in American history where Meyer Lansky mobilized Jewish mobsters to go after domestic Nazis in New Jersey www.tabletmag.com/sections/new...

What is comparatively the most minor event that marks the point at which the timelines started to diverge?

The Shukhov Towers on the Oka River in Russia, the world’s only diagrid hyperboloid transmission towers. Pictured in 1988, only one stands today because the entire left tower was stolen, Carmen Sandiego style, in 2005.

elon musk at cpac was so fucking weird you guys I know this reads like a parody but I literally just wrote down what happened www.theverge.com/elon-musk/61...

"the woke mind virus" mind virus

french mcdonalds is something else

seven year old nephew just drew this in crayon on my window (???)

my toxic trait is scheduling slack messages with odd minute increments (0:17, 0:22, 0:56) for that added “in front of keyboard” verisimilitude

one of my absolute favorite things is seeing a friend pop off in multiple mutual groupchats at the same time

vibe shift: substack officially renames "trust and safety" to "standards and enforcement"

*mcphee intensifying*

It’s 1984 and there’s a guy in Atlanta writing a memo comparing the rollout of New Coke with D-Day.

what is the shortest, most powerful book ever written

the idea that xiaohongshu is actually a reference not to mao but to stanford GSB and bain is just so, so sweet

a shitposter should be able to troll a sucker, plan an invasion, fake an image, code a website, shoot a gun, quote Gwern, shill a substack, pretend to be a lawyer, sense vibes, start vibes, manipulate an algorithm, stay anonymous, die gallantly. specialization is for threads.

traditional cigarettes are due for a huge comeback since they’re one of the most potent things that kids will have to offend the sensibilities of their millennial parents

incredible

You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

parenting divides the built landscape into surfaces which are visible and reachable visible and not reachable not visible and reachable neither visible nor reachable

calvin and hobbes (june 30, 1993)

“systems thinking”, once the preferred analytical frame of the tech intelligentsia, is increasingly an out of fashion mental model for the world in its place - direct, reductionist weltanschauung: “you can just do things” the midwit meme “high agency” mysticism grand histories

enjoying the All Souls past examination questions

my new thing in 2025 is going to be library tourism. if you pull up to a new city with me we're going to the mf library

today, i commend to you this unbelievably great funky song-poem about jimmy carter www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Psi...

the style and effortless cool i’m aspiring to in 2025

when your wife really, really gets you

going through and wishing merry christmas to the groupchats like carolers going door to door spreading holiday cheer

As part of an experiment digitizing 40 year old videotapes, I pulled out of from 325 hours about an hour of Boston-area commercials from 1984. It's got everything: Long-lost brands, holiday wishes, calls to visit Florida. So much more. Check it out: archive.org/details/Mari...

die hard is a hanukkah film (foreigners looting a temple, miracles involving fire)

the societal transition from traditional to digital media has been transition of the marketplace of ideas from a monopoly to a monopsony

whole symposium to be done on this photo

and this “civil society” - is it in the room with us right now?

rewatching nightmare before christmas and debating whether or not halloween town is a mayor-council or a council-manager system municipality