~/reading

96 entries · updated 2026-09-24 · my personal favorite reads

## short form — essays & articles48 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. 19i can tolerate anything except the outgroup · scott alexander
  20. 20on bullshit · harry frankfurt
  21. 21on the shortness of life · seneca
  22. 22the disadvantages of an elite education · william deresiewicz
  23. 23cowardice and the closing of hampshire college · faune albert (the chronicle of higher education)
  24. 24how does our language shape the way we think? · lera boroditsky
  25. 25in defense of distraction · sam anderson
  26. 26the ones who walk away from omelas · ursula k. le guin
  27. 27truth and politics · hannah arendt
  28. 28cargo cult science · richard feynman
  29. 29on self-respect · joan didion
  30. 30a modest proposal · jonathan swift
  31. 31the death of the moth · virginia woolf
  32. 32federer as religious experience · david foster wallace
  33. 33the urgency of interpretability · dario amodei
  34. 34situational awareness · leopold aschenbrenner
  35. 35the intelligence curse · luke drago & rudolf laine
  36. 36the gentle singularity · sam altman
  37. 37there's no fire alarm for agi · eliezer yudkowsky
  38. 38the college essay is dead · stephen marche
  39. 39everyone is cheating their way through college · james walsh
  40. 40drowning in slop · max read
  41. 41i will f---ing piledrive you if you mention ai again · nikhil suresh
  42. 42the coddling of the american mind · greg lukianoff & jonathan haidt
  43. 43the moral decline of elite universities · ben sasse (the atlantic)
  44. 44why do so many elite students want to be investment bankers? · james kwak (baseline scenario)
  45. 45on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs · david graeber
  46. 46the company man · tomás b. (lesswrong)
  47. 47become a person who actually does things · neel nanda
  48. 48what is -1 to 0? · Ruchi Sanghvi

## 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 & technical20 entries

  1. 01Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention · ho et al. (arxov 2609.02747)
  2. 02Measuring the Gap Between Human and LLM Research Ideas · zhao et al. (arxiv 2607.01233)
  3. 03improving the matrix multiplication exponent with modern optimization and alphaevolve · dupont et al. (arxiv 2608.16884)
  4. 04mind viruses: self-propagating ideas in multi-agent llm systems · papadopoulos et al. (arxiv 2608.10218)
  5. 05stealing reasoning traces from proprietary llm apis · panfilov et al. (arxiv 2608.09867)
  6. 06matraix: simulating the world with 8.3 billion persona agents · li et al. (arxiv 2608.04205)
  7. 07why ais (might) obey the law · sachdeva & kolt (ssrn 2026)
  8. 08prompt injection as role confusion · ye, cui & hadfield-menell (icml 2026)
  9. 09genai as a power persuader · randazzo et al., hbs working paper 26-021
  10. 10how llms distort our written language · arxiv 2603.18161
  11. 11learning representations by back-propagating errors · rumelhart, hinton & williams (1986)
  12. 12why larger models learn more: effects of capacity, interference, and rare-task retention · arxiv 2605.29548
  13. 13how much do llms hallucinate in document q&a scenarios? · arxiv 2603.08274
  14. 14self-harness: harnesses that improve themselves · arxiv 2606.09498
  15. 15on the dangers of stochastic parrots · bender, gebru, mcmillan-major & mitchell (faact 2021)
  16. 16the bitter lesson · rich sutton
  17. 17toy models of superposition · anthropic (elhage et al.)
  18. 18a mathematical framework for transformer circuits · anthropic (elhage et al.)
  19. 19clever hans or neural theory of mind? · shapira et al. (2023)
  20. 20every author as first author · demaine & demaine (arxiv 2304.01393)