Unseasonal War

Adam Tooze | Chartbook | Mar 04, 2026

For most of history it was obvious that one should schedule conflict so as to avoid clashing with the agricultural cycle. Autumn, when the harvest was in, was the ideal moment for big battles. That was why major military maneuvers were generally held at that time of year. Even as late as 1914 the harvest timetable may have played some role in the war planning of combatants.

The current war is disastrous from the point of view of the modern agricultural cycle.

The gulf region handles about one third of the global trade in inorganic nutrients and in terms of the agricultural cycle this is the key moment for shipments to be steaming out from the Gulf towards the major agricultural zones of the world.

Why You Can’t Just Do Things

Octopusyarn | Feb 12, 2026

“You can just do things”, along with other memes, stories, and descriptions, sits at the most superficial level, the propositional. This is talking about agency, which has little to do with having agency. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have a concept for it than not, but “agency” explicitly points at doing.

Procedural knowing is where the rubber meets the road. This is agency as a form of doing, as know-how. Visa’s Do 100 Things is great advice for building skills. We’re getting closer. But agency isn’t really about doing anything in particular, but about the capacity to do stuff in general.

That’s where we enter the realm of perspectival knowing: Agency as a way of looking. Your worldview determines your affordances, the “handles” reality offers you. For example, nothing seems worth doing to a depressed person, while a manic person urgently wants to do everything all at once. As Chapman argues in How to Think Real Good, effective action stems from problem formulation more than problem-solving. You need to see which distinctions matter and which are irrelevant noise.

Most fundamentally, agency lives on the participatory level. Self and world co-constitute each other through interaction. The jazz musician doesn’t represent the song in their head and then play it; they’re embedded in the jam, responsive, shaping and being shaped by the musical space. Doing stuff means bumping into the world. Fucking around to find out is usually the most effective way to make progress.

If people could swap qualia, it would blow their minds more than that third hit of DMT. Agency emerges from the deep structures of our world-model. It would break your brain to experience just how differently other people move through the world.

Note: There are constraints to being high agency around big decisions but do you really need to pick up your phone as often as you do?