2025-12-22

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation #media

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) 

The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997.

The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new.

This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character. 

It’s a broader problem.

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since.

But I am uncomfortable with Substack as the default standard-bearer for independent thought.

The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A16z's partners are as establishment as establishment gets: they sit on the boards of major tech companies, they socialize with senators and moguls and Donald Trump and his clan, they're regularly cited as visionary thinkers in the same airports bookstores where you find the Gladwell and Brooks titles. The idea that a platform funded by these people represents some kind of intellectual insurgency is, at minimum, in tension with the actual power dynamics at play.

I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy here, that a16z is using Substack to promote certain viewpoints or suppress others. I don't think that's how it works, or at least it’s not how it works yet. The influence is more structural and subtle. Substack's investors want the platform to succeed, and success in the current media environment means attracting the kind of writers who can build large audiences. Large audiences, in the current environment, tend to come from a certain kind of content: culture war commentary, contrarianism that flatters particular demographics, lifestyle content for the professional class, and yes, the occasional original thinker who happens to be accessible enough to go viral.

The result is that Substack's version of independent thought looks suspiciously like the establishment thought it's supposed to be replacing, just with different political valences. Where the old establishment was center-left liberal, the Substack counter-establishment leans toward heterodox centrism that's critical of progressive excesses while being very careful not to threaten the tech industry or the investor class. Bari Weiss, one of Substack's highest-profile writers, is a perfect example. She positions herself as a brave truth-teller taking on the illiberal left, but her actual analysis rarely if ever questions the structural arrangements that benefit people in her social position. She's David Brooks in different packaging: iconoclasm that poses no threat to power, courage that risks nothing.

Indian coffee shops

India’s coffee shops are leveraging craft pastries - Coffee Intelligence #india #cafe

It's a bit nostalgic to read about Indian coffee shops where I spent a significant portion of my time before moving to Berlin.

India’s coffee market is forecast to double by 2030, with revenues from coffee shops rising at nearly twice the pace of their American counterparts – a sign of both growing affluence and an evolving urban palate. If coffee is the reason customers walk in, pastries are now the reason they stay and spend.

In wealthy economies, cafés once relied on their core product, anything ranging from a great cappuccino to an ethical supply chain or even a knack for latte art. Like in other emerging coffee markets – China for example – India skipped that era. As specialty – or at least premium – coffee leapfrogged from novelty to mainstream in major cities and even in small north Indian towns and cities, standing out required more than fresh-roasted beans and a V60 bar.

Chains like Blue Tokai helped build consumer literacy. But once a critical mass of urban Indians knew what a flat white was, the category became crowded and price-sensitive. Recent rising coffee prices also meant the premium and specialty coffee segment ran the risk of becoming too inaccessible. If everyone could serve decent coffee, differentiation had to come from elsewhere.

Enter the pastry revolution.

In a country that has leapt from instant coffee to specialty culture in a single generational stride, it is perhaps fitting that its cafés are no longer just places to drink coffee – but third spaces built to impress, taste and post.

It makes me a bit sad reading this, because it implies a cafe that exclusively focuses on providing top class coffee is not gonna make it in India. This also explains why it is extremely rare to find Indian coffee shops that serve international coffees, i.e. coffee brewed from beans across the world.

Performative Reading

The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” | The New Yorker

Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.

“Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close.

2025-12-25

Coffee Omakase

Coffee omakase is Japan’s love letter to caffeine

Italy brought us cappuccinos. Australia introduced the flat white. Cuba created the cafecito, and the Middle East, the qahwa.

Japan is bringing us coffee omakase.

In Japan, there are a number of cafes specializing in coffee omakase. Over the course of three days, I sampled four of them in a highly caffeinated journey through Tokyo and Kyoto. It evoked the dining experience associated with high-end sushi, placing you in the hands of an expert to curate and overwhelm your senses. (Omakase translates to “I’ll leave it up to you.”)

2025-12-27

AI and Programming - Hot Takes by Karpathy and Cherny

Andrej Karpathy broke AI Twitter the day after Christmas by tweeting that he “never felt this much behind as a programmer.”

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code piled on to say - “I feel this way most weeks tbh.” and went on - “The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is still just the beginning.”

The one redeeming thing about Boris Cherny's tweet was that it kicked off a thread where he gave out a lot of very specific tips in the thread on how the Claude Code team uses Claude Code to write code. Folks might miss it because it branches off the main thread from Karpathy’s tweet. But there is some absolute gold in there.

I had a bout of insomnia last night (for reasons unrelated to AI taking my job, I will add!) when I came across these tweets. I managed to get off my bed and opened Claude Code to hack on my side project, but mainly it was an excuse to try out some of the tips and techniques mentioned in the thread. I guess the hustle is real! 🙃