This week, I've been thinking a lot about self-interest. In any system containing entities with distinct, personalized needs or drive, an inherent tension arises between the efficiency of the overall system and the needs of each individual within it.
A new habit: Five Song Fridays. It's exactly what it sounds like. I'll try to share five songs. On Fridays!
Comparing some budgets and some books.
This isn't about astrology, I promise.
I managed to read 65 books this year. As an end-of-year victory lap, here's a few highlights, and a couple of suggested personal curricula. My full reading list for the year is all the way at the bottom, if you're here for that for some reason.
On value collapse and the balance between metrics and gestalt.
Here are a couple of interesting things about Gregor Mendel that I did not know, even though I got my B.S. in a building named after him!
Some takeaways from ChangeNOW 2025.
Fate sits at the heart of the Nordic sagas, lurking beneath the surface of the text like the ships intentionally sunk at Roskilde. Unseen but absolutely essential to those in the know. Detractors of these works (perhaps students in their initial exposure to this category of literature), will complain that
As the new management of Idiosyncrasy Booksellers, I must be cutthroat in my shelving schemes...
The multidimensional audacity of Divina Commedia is well established. A Christo-classical epic, written in the vernacular, chockablock with timely political commentary woven into theological exploration. Dante does not leave a single color untouched on his palette...
A little before eleven in the morning on February 7th, 1904, fire alarms began to sound across Baltimore. For the next thirty hours, the Great Baltimore Fire scorched the city...