~/reading

88 entries · updated 2026-08-07 · my personal favorite reads

## short form — essays & articles47 entries

  1. 01politics and the english language · george orwell
  2. 02this is water (kenyon commencement, 2005) · david foster wallace
  3. 03should writers use they own english? · vershawn ashanti young
  4. 04child's play · sam kriss (harper's)
  5. 05in defense of a loaded word · ta-nehisi coates
  6. 06on thinking · northrop frye
  7. 07does your language shape how you think? · guy deutscher
  8. 08welcome to harvard. when are you leaving? · the crimson editorial board
  9. 09can quantum computers solve chess? · the chessboard vault
  10. 10randar: an explanation · spawnmason
  11. 11a global workspace in language models · anthropic
  12. 12american kids can't do math anymore · the atlantic
  13. 13such, such were the joys · george orwell
  14. 14authority and american usage · david foster wallace
  15. 15e unibus pluram: television and u.s. fiction · david foster wallace
  16. 16the internet is already over · sam kriss
  17. 17you and your research · richard hamming
  18. 18the kekulé problem · cormac mccarthy
  19. 19meditations on moloch · scott alexander
  20. 20i can tolerate anything except the outgroup · scott alexander
  21. 21on bullshit · harry frankfurt
  22. 22on the shortness of life · seneca
  23. 23the disadvantages of an elite education · william deresiewicz
  24. 24cowardice and the closing of hampshire college · faune albert (the chronicle of higher education)
  25. 25how does our language shape the way we think? · lera boroditsky
  26. 26in defense of distraction · sam anderson
  27. 27the ones who walk away from omelas · ursula k. le guin
  28. 28truth and politics · hannah arendt
  29. 29cargo cult science · richard feynman
  30. 30on self-respect · joan didion
  31. 31a modest proposal · jonathan swift
  32. 32the death of the moth · virginia woolf
  33. 33federer as religious experience · david foster wallace
  34. 34the urgency of interpretability · dario amodei
  35. 35situational awareness · leopold aschenbrenner
  36. 36the gentle singularity · sam altman
  37. 37there's no fire alarm for agi · eliezer yudkowsky
  38. 38chatgpt is a blurry jpeg of the web · ted chiang
  39. 39the college essay is dead · stephen marche
  40. 40everyone is cheating their way through college · james walsh
  41. 41drowning in slop · max read
  42. 42i will f---ing piledrive you if you mention ai again · nikhil suresh
  43. 43the coddling of the american mind · greg lukianoff & jonathan haidt
  44. 44elite colleges are making their own students stupid · the atlantic
  45. 45why do so many elite students want to be investment bankers? · james kwak (baseline scenario)
  46. 46on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs · david graeber
  47. 47the company man · lesswrong

## long form — books28 entries

  1. 01genesis: artificial intelligence, hope, and the human spirit · kissinger, schmidt & mundie
  2. 02amusing ourselves to death · neil postman
  3. 03solving mathematical problems (second edition) · terence tao
  4. 04amorality and greed at silicon valley's favorite university · theo baker
  5. 05brave new world · aldous huxley
  6. 06rainbows end · vernor vinge
  7. 07point counter point · aldous huxley
  8. 08metamorphosis · franz kafka
  9. 09the trial · franz kafka
  10. 10white noise · don delillo
  11. 11swamplandia! · karen russell
  12. 12we · yevgeny zamyatin
  13. 13the machine stops · e. m. forster
  14. 14accelerando · charles stross
  15. 15mao ii · don delillo
  16. 16excellent sheep · william deresiewicz
  17. 17technopoly · neil postman
  18. 18the shallows · nicholas carr
  19. 19the true believer · eric hoffer
  20. 20the alignment problem · brian christian
  21. 21blood meridian · cormac mccarthy
  22. 22east of eden · john steinbeck
  23. 23where is my flying car? · j. storrs hall
  24. 24the road to serfdom · friedrich hayek
  25. 25thinking in systems · donella meadows
  26. 26enlightenment now · steven pinker
  27. 27thinking, fast and slow · daniel kahneman
  28. 28the selfish gene · richard dawkins

## academic — papers & technical13 entries

  1. 01why ais (might) obey the law · sachdeva & kolt (ssrn 2026)
  2. 02prompt injection as role confusion · ye, cui & hadfield-menell (icml 2026)
  3. 03genai as a power persuader · randazzo et al., hbs working paper 26-021
  4. 04how llms distort our written language · arxiv 2603.18161
  5. 05learning representations by back-propagating errors · rumelhart, hinton & williams (1986)
  6. 06why larger models learn more: effects of capacity, interference, and rare-task retention · arxiv 2605.29548
  7. 07how much do llms hallucinate in document q&a scenarios? · arxiv 2603.08274
  8. 08self-harness: harnesses that improve themselves · arxiv 2606.09498
  9. 09on the dangers of stochastic parrots · bender, gebru, mcmillan-major & mitchell (faact 2021)
  10. 10the bitter lesson · rich sutton
  11. 11toy models of superposition · anthropic (elhage et al.)
  12. 12a mathematical framework for transformer circuits · anthropic (elhage et al.)
  13. 13clever hans or neural theory of mind? · shapira et al. (2023)