Links & What I’ve Been Reading, February

Media recommendations

PSA: If you are in Dublin (or can be) this week, we are running a Fitzwilliam meetup on Friday the 23rd of February at 7:30pm, come join! 

As with last month, here are the highlights from my recent media consumption. If you have any recommendations for things I might like, you can email me at sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. 

Blogs

Dan Schulz’s bookshelf. And Kevin Simler’s reading list. And the Dan Wang bookshelf, especially strong for China book recommendations.  

Time Magazine on dating prediction markets. As I recently said in a groupchat with my friends: “Prediction markets face the same problem as any form of dating associated with obscure forms of financial derivates: too few women.”  

Dan Wang, 2023 letter. Wang’s letters are always recommended, although this one was more of an informal travelogue than his previous letters. He gives a shoutout to the podcast episode we appeared on together! He was as confused as I was as to why I was there. 

Which beliefs cause low fertility among women? Aria Babu tells us that socially progressive beliefs about the role of women (like that mothers should have active careers) are uncorrelated with birthrate. But the more you think that having kids is a lot of work and that they can be easily screwed up by their parents, the fewer children you have. 

Matt Yglesias contra the techno-optimist’s fallacy. Marc Andreessen is treading the well-worn path from formerly respectable technology entrepreneur to crank.  

John Burn-Murdoch on the rapidly growing chasm in political beliefs between young men and women. The fact that women are so much more left-wing than men perhaps relates to fewer people being in relationships and getting married, given the level of intolerance people often have for those with differing political views. There was some dispute about the dataset he was using, but he had a convincing-sounding response on Twitter; I haven’t really looked into it.  

Andy Matuschak: In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023. Andy is both a gentleman and a scholar. 

Scott Aaronson, 30 of my favorite books. I have read eight from his list. And Scott’s review of Enlightenment Now. 

We are reading the scrolls! What a wonderful time to be alive.

Tim Urban’s thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro.     

Podcasts

The Rest is History on the history of fascism in Britain and the Mitford sisters. I had no idea Lord Skidelsky had also written a biography of Oswald Mosley. Or, indeed, who the Mitford sisters were.  

The excellent 99% Invisible book club on the Power Broker continues. The Power Broker is the only book I’ve read where a stranger has approached me in public just to comment on it.

Lucia Coulter on her successes preventing lead poisoning in developing countries. Utterly inspiring. See also my new friend Hugo Smith’s writings about how much lead poisoning is caused by battery recycling. 

Emily Oster discusses pregnancy and parenting for 80,000 Hours.    

Very Bad Wizards discuss one of my favourite films I’ve seen in recent years, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. And Alex Tabarrok and Agnes Callard debate the same topic. The latter also contains a discussion of whether Parasite is a deeply reactionary and socially conservative film (I say yes). 

The Rewatchables just did fun live shows about Forrest Gump and Creed.   

Joe Walker and Andy Lee discuss comedy. I love that video of Hamish on Hamish and Andy getting stung by the bullet ants.   

Music

Some albums I discovered, or listened to seriously for the first time, this month: 

Yellowjackets, Mint Jam. Especially ‘Les is Mo’ and ‘Tortoise and the Hare’. 

Duke Ellington, Ellington Indigos.

Miles Davis, Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1957. Previously unreleased, hat-tip Andrew Batson.    

John Scofield, A Go Go. 

Kenny Garrett, Trilogy. 

Films

Rashida Jones, Quincy. I had no idea Rashida Jones was Quincy Jones’ daughter, or that she had directed a documentary about him. This film is essentially plotless, and so consists of two hours of just witnessing how cool a life Quincy Jones has. Recommended.    

S.S. Rajamouli, RRR. My Indian flatmate savaged me for describing this film as ‘Bollywood’ (it is originally in the Telugu language). The dialogue was recorded so strangely that the British characters speaking English sound as off as the dubbed-over Indian characters. I have to admit, I find this film’s 95% Rotten Tomatoes score completely baffling.

Peter Lennon, The Rocky Road to Dublin. “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” Controversial documentary from 1967 painting a bleak portrait of a repressive and conservative post-independence Ireland. Incredibly, the film was shot by legendary New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. The screening was interrupted by the outbreak of the 1968 student protests in Paris – and the film became more widely viewed in French literary circles than in Ireland. Make sure you watch the version with 30 minutes of extra material at the end, giving context about the film’s release.  

David Fincher, Fight Club. Surprisingly, I’d never seen this film before – and as always, it’s difficult to watch a film that has been so culturally influential for the first time with fresh eyes. 

Armando Iannucci, In the Loop. Film spinoff of ‘The Thick of It’. Pretty funny.  

Books

Bram Stoker, Dracula. I have now crossed off two books from my list of books I did not read in 2023. In case you’re not aware, Dracula is written entirely in the form of diary entries, letters, telegrams and newspaper clippings, which I presume was a very innovative format for the time. I am woeful at reading novels and trying to get better. Next on the list is Dubliners by James Joyce.  

David Edmond and Nigel Warburton, Philosophy Bites. More intellectual popcorn. 

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper. An underrated masterpiece. I just can’t get enough of philosophy written in dialogue format.   

Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack (of which Stripe Press just produced a beautiful reprinting). Best consumed as an audiobook on 2x speed. My understanding is that the existence of firms like Berkshire Hathaway does disprove a strong version of efficient markets – but still, self-aggrandising business books like this pay insufficient attention to all the ways the author got lucky. It is amusing to me how there is a certain type of reader who reveres both Poor Charlie’s Almanack and Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, even though the central messages of those books could not be more different. 

John Drennan, Paddy Machiavelli. A politically influential academic in Ireland once told me that this satirical book is the single best guide to how political power works in Ireland.

Papers

Heather Gert, Alternative Analyses. A semi-defence of conceptual analysis – or rather, an argument that the necessary-and-sufficient conditions view and the ‘concepts as clusters’ view are not as different as they seem. 

Bernard Suits, Is Life a Game We Are Playing?

Robert Solow, Why is there no Milton Friedman Today? I am on Team Bob.

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