Recommendations

Oct 1, 2022, 02:50 pm

This page will — over time — collect short recommendations of great pieces of content that I particularly enjoy or appreciate.

This is a work in progress. Additional entries and categories will be added in the future.

Great essays
Great video essays
Great short stories and comics

Great essays

“Tech and Liberty” by Ben Thompson, Stratechery (2019-11-05). Quote: “‘This is a liberal principle of tolerance towards others. It’s not an absolute, it isn’t comprehensive, it isn’t rigorously defined, and it isn’t a law.’ What it is is a culture.”
“Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate” by Lili Loofbourow, Slate (2020-07-12). Quote: “It’s also true that people who’ve learned to read through texts (to whatever bummer of a subtext we’re used to finding there) can overdo it. We sometimes skip the content of the text itself and reflexively fast-forward to the shitty point we ‘know’ is coming even if maybe it isn’t… The rational move has become to presume bad faith.”
“Stop Thinking like a GM; Start Thinking Like a Player” by Matt Corbett, FanGraphs (2015-09-15). Quote: “‘Replacement Level’ is one of those ideas that, once one understands it, one immediately recognizes its intuitive obviousness and is embarrassed to have not thought of it before… ‘Replacement Level’ labor was the most analytically powerful conceptual advance in economics since Rational Expectations.”
“The Running of the Dead” by Christian Thorne (2010-07-24). Quote: “Authoritarianism reveals itself to be a universalized fear of savagery, a generalized racism in which the category of ‘the lesser race’ expands uncontrollably to include all people. It is racism extrapolated into paranoia, though one of the many curious things about Dawn is how compulsively, in that opening documentary footage, it preserves its racial sources. The movie, when all is said and done, has so little to do with terrorists that it could just as well have dispensed with the Islam-baiting, but it doesn’t.”
“How did the Ming Vase become the de facto ‘priceless’ object often broken in comedy?” by Cait Stevenson, AskHistorians (2017-06-21). Quote: “Ming, specifically, ceramics thus had two things going for them that were crucial to the later Victorian insatiability for prestige collecting: they were rare (in comparison to the Qing porcelain flooding in from the Netherlands) and perceived as exotic, featuring Chinese trends in decoration instead of European ones. When the middle classes could participate in the lure of ‘the Orient’ through the purchase of cheap European knockoffs or modern Chinese variants, the rich simply upped the ante: not just Chinese ceramics, but Ming.”
“The Day the Good Internet Died” by Katie Baker, The Ringer (2021-07-21). Quote: “In reality, those traditional blogs had been going dormant for years, and the medium continued to lose people and places—to the lucre of YouTube or Instagram, or to the litigious tag-team of Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel, or to the micro-ease of Twitter or Tumblr.”
“There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)” by Georgia Ray (2021-05-02). Quote: “There are no unique ‘tree’ genes. It’s just a different expression of genes that plants already use.”
“Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable,” by Daniel Hertz (2018-10-30), City Observatory. Quote: “We say we want housing to be cheap and we want home ownership to be a great financial investment. Until we realize that these two objectives are mutually exclusive, we’ll continue to be frustrated by failed and oftentimes counterproductive housing policies.”
“The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories,” by Scott Alexander (2014-11-21). Quote: “Hume’s ethics restrict “bad” to an instrumental criticism – you can condemn something as a bad way to achieve a certain goal, but not as morally bad independent of what the goal is. In the same way, borders can be bad at fulfilling your goals in drawing them, but not bad in an absolute sense or factually incorrect.”
“On Bullshit,” by Harry Frankfurt (1986). Quote: “One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself.”
“American Gentry,” by Patrick Wyman (2020-09-17). Quote: “This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets.”
“Red Families, Blue Families, Gay Families, and the Search for a New Normal,” by Jonathan Rauch (Summer 2010). Quote: “The ‘new normal’ prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. It enjoins: Don’t form a family until after you have finished your education and are ready for adult responsibility. In other words, adults form families—not the other way around. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning.”
“A Plea for Culinary Modernism,” by Rachel Laudan (May 22, 2015), Jacobin. Quote: “That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.”
“Science is a strong-link problem,” by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History. Quote: “Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely… It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters.”