July 9, 2024

June 2024 updates

Hi everyone,

New essays

• I'm terrified of old people.
• I'm broke, divorced, and unemployed. By any reasonable measure, I'm probably the worst person in the world to ask for advice.

Links

1. Six Victorian marriages, part 1: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle
2. On Biden-Obama relationship.
3. "I was Mike Tyson’s hardest fight despite $150-a-day heroin addiction and gangster life"

What I've been reading

1. Anna: The Biography by Amy Odell. Very good.
2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. One of the few books I keep thinking about many years after I first read it. Re-reading now and appreciating it more than ever before.
3. Dignity by Chris Arnade. Difficult but rewarding. I can't stop feeling that Arnade isn't willing to go all the way and be fully serious and this prevents him from really understanding the people he's writing about.
4. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow. Obsessively, ridiculously, gratuitously detailed, yet remains engaging throughout. This is what Caro's books should've been like.
5. Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. I very much enjoyed the books "to-the-point" style and the defense it offered to common sense lindy thinking; but I kept feeling that "liberty, and prosperity" are just not enough for the kind of big vision Cowen is trying to arrive to. What about justice?

Other

1. Pictures I took at a Palestine protest at MIT.
2. I'm in DC most of July (thanks to the sui generis Mehran Jalali for a couch) -- let me know if you're in the area, I'll try to set up a lunch for readers at some point.
3. I'm thinking a lot about law these days and pondering spending the fall hanging out at Yale Law School (spending the spring studying physics at MIT was wonderful). If you have anything to do with law (or if you're at Yale), I'd love to talk to you about this.

Have a great July!

Stay frosty,
Alexey