Recent: On Anthropic v. Pentagon; On Anthropic and the puzzling nature of Claude (with podcast appearances on Chris Hayes, Search Engine, Fresh Air, Paul Ford, and others); On the global history of capitalism; on the legacy of Rebecca West; on the golden age of serial killers; on Martha Wells of “The Murderbot Diaries”; on Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”; on “antimemetics” and virality; on the phenomenon of global fertility decline; on a book by Palantir’s CEO.
Recent but not quite as recent: on Atossa Abrahamian’s “The Hidden Globe”; on a Bitcoin documentary; on a resolution to the Francesca Gino scandal; on the little magazine Jewish Currents; on flying cars (with podcast appearances on Search Engine and Plain English); on Jewish identity with and without Zionism; on Dan Ariely, Francesca Gino, and fraud in the behavioral sciences; on Michael Lewis’s SBF book; a dispatch from the SBF trial; on states and corporations as runaway machines; on dying patients who want experimental drugs; on olive oil in coffee; on Francesco Costa and Italian politics.
Somewhat less recent: On Sam Bankman-Fried and EA complicity; on Will MacAskill and effective altruism; on Jonathan Haidt and the harms of social media; on a Chinese professor accused of being a spy; on an account of a Hasidic enclave; on the politics of behavior genetics; on the UFO renaissance (with accompanying audio (New Yorker Radio Hour), a CNN hit, and an appearance on Chris Hayes’s podcast). On remembering Janet Malcolm.
From 2013: on Janet Malcolm (Times Literary Supplement).
Previously: on Slate Star Codex and the New York Times (New Yorker); on the pandemic and “social trust” (Wired); on Ezra Klein, Rene Girard, and polarization (Wired); on Michael Apted on the occasion of “63 Up” (New York Times Magazine); on the controversial rise of the study of ancient DNA (New York Times Magazine); on Tezos, a blockchain love/horror story (Wired); on a walk-in storefront private-jet dealership (New York Times Magazine).
Full archive, including juvenilia, here.
