Links (and other things) for August 2025

As always, link $\neq$ agree or endorse or support the moral character of the author or text or anything like that — just interesting things to think with.

This month I was traveling around a lot, but I still read a surprising amount of essays I guess. (I intended to buy a book to read while in London, but couldn't pick, so I ended up not buying anything. Then on my way back through I bought two.)

• This month I discovered Sam Kriss whose writing I really enjoyed.
  • The law that cannot be named is not the true law
  • Dreams never end
  • Where babies come from
• Likewise, I rediscovered how good Henrik Karlsson's writing is.
  • How to Solve A Problem
  • On Agency
  • Repeat Great Words, Repeat Them Stubbornly
• Wikipedia
  • Haruki Murakami used to run a jazz bar. Now students at his alma mater, Waseda University, run a jazz bar playing records curated by Murakami, inside a library that hosts all his work.
  • The Iroquois confederation has a really interesting oral constitution — it has law and political structure, but also symbolism, ritual, mythology all integrated together. Supposedly it dates back possibly to the 12th century (see Wikipedia). It's hard to tell what's real, but it seems like this is a version/translation of it.
  • Old Catholicism separated off from Catholicism over the First Vatican Council. They're now based afaik.
  • Pseudo-platonica
  • Hierarchy of function growth rates
  • Concentration of measure theorems
  • Wikipedia Human Enhancement topics
• Should Strong Gods Bet on GDP? by Scott Alexander
• Review by the Psmiths of a primary school latin textbook. Far more interesting than it might immediately appear.
  • Found two cool books designed to teach you Latin and Old English through this review :D
• Essay by Peli Grietzer that I haven't read yet but intend to: Patterns of the lifeworld
• Weekly review template
• Study suggesting that economics students defect more than non-economics students.
• The Gostek
• Psychofauna Studies: a Manifesto

Books. I didn't read most of them, but they're sitting in my head:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I already knew about this book and at one point read like two pages of it. I finally bought a copy in a bookstore in London, two weeks after I had failed to buy anything there before lol.
  • This one I'm about halfway through as of writing. It is a complicated book, I'm still making up my mind about it.
• If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. Impulse buy.
• Anything by Chekhov. Looking for recommendations.
• The Master and Margarita. Mentioned ironically in a tour of a former KGB surveillance office.
• Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. I already knew about it, but some guy on the bus from Tallinn to Riga, Latvia said something like, "it's objectively a good book but it's very boring" which I thought was funny.
• Works by Deleuze and Guattari. Not a new discovery, but a new light: "they came up with complex systems theory but it's tragically in the language of 20th century french continental philosophy."
• Seeing Like A State: I knew it as a rationalist classic, now have a vague sense (?) for why — the idea that legibility reifies, i.e. the map shapes the territory.
• Language books
  • The New Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas G Brown. Designed to teach you Russian from first principles. On perusal, I really liked the approach and seemed like how my ideal textbook would be structured. I discovered it in a bookstore in Vilnius, Lithuania for 3 euros, but I didn't buy because I realized I wouldn't buy it for 17 euros, and if I wasn't going to buy it for 17 euros I definitely was not going to spend many many hours of my life actually reading it.
  • "The most popular text for the natural method, Danish linguist Hans Orberg's Lingua Latin Per Se Illustrata, is (except for the author's name on the title page) entirely in Latin. It introduces grammatical concepts gradually, in contexts that try to make it clear exactly what's going on, with illustrations and marginal notes (in Latin!) to clarify."
  • There's another one for Old English too, "Colin Gorrie’s splendid Osweald Bera, an Old English reader that employs the same inductive approach as Ørberg’s Latin text (but has a much more engaging storyline)."