August Links

What I'm Reading

Author

Riley Haas
August 30, 2025

What I’m Reading:

  • Brad Stone: The Everything Store (2013): I wasn’t sure I should read this because a) it’s 12 years old and b) I wasn’t sure it would be critical enough. So far it’s…critical ish. But it has further convinced me that Bezos is not someone to be admired even before he decided to support the authoritarian takeover of the US government. (See below.)

  • Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992): I have no idea what to do with this. It’s clear to me it’s been hugely influential. I don’t actually know whether or not it’s been hugely influential on other science fiction authors. (And I can say I haven’t seen too many films I would say were obviously influenced by it.) But it seems like it has been hugely influential on the tech bros who are currently attempting to run the world, and who think the rest of us are dumber than them because we’re less socially awkward, we don’t share the same obsessions and we don’t read as much science fiction. This is, of course, not Stephenson’s fault, but there is enough in this novel to make me feel like Stephenson is probably on their side at least a little bit. And I do wonder if what was meant as dystopian in 1992 is now seen as at least somewhat aspirational (by both the tech bros and the author). And I say all that before I get to the icky part. You should be aware that, though this novel is acclaimed, few reviewers will tell you abut the sex scene featuring a 15 year old girl. Well there is one and it’s probably worse than you think.

  • “The Wedding Wars”: I am lucky (and unlucky) in that I don’t really have much of a culture. My family is basically Canadian/American. We have no strong cultural or religious traditions we adhere to. This piece about the changing nature of weddings in India terrifies me. I am so grateful that I am just generic “white” and have no weird cultural traditions to uphold, even though we have chosen not to marry (so far).

  • “The Rage of the AI Guy”: “They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death.” And “[LLMs] can generate a poem about garbage day in the style of Wallace Stevens, but they won’t drag the can to the curb.”

  • “The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius”: This is a couple of years old.

  • “Bag of words, have mercy on us”: A way of thinking about LLMs.

  • “Did RFK just take away your cancer treatment?”: Murica, but mRNA technology saved so many lives and so much of the medical research that has transformed our lives in the last 100 or so years has come from the United States.

  • “My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes”: This starts out as a fun thing about the history of mashed and instant potatoes and turns into thoughts about what is real, anyway, man.

  • “Researchers beware of ChatGPT's "Wikipedia Brain"“: Here is a specific test of the latest LLM’s ability to do “deep research.”

  • “Malice, aberration, justice”: This mostly aligns with my moral intuitions. I don’t think it’s very realistic, though.

  • “The West is bored to death”: I don’t completely agree with this but plenty of it, especially “American greatness has produced a society whose members know not what to do with the freedom and abundance that earlier generations secured. We are now witnessing the squandering of this inheritance, and it is even more idiotic and vulgar a spectacle than anyone would expect.”

  • “What If We Held a Constitutional Crisis and Nobody Came?”: Related to the quote above.

  • “Why we stopped building subways cheaply”: A technical explanation.

  • “Is Air Travel Getting Worse?”: I skimmed this the other day then saw it shared again and decided to actually read it. It’s about the States but likely applies to us too.

  • “Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t”: This is a fascinating piece on what schizophrenia is or isn’t and whether or not there may be biological reasons for it.

  • “The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse”: Presumably if these guys had been poor, and people of colour, it would have never gone this far.

  • “Vietnam War: A refugee returns with his son on the 50th anniversary”: Traveling to Vietnam on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war as a Vietnamese American with your parents.

  • “Predicting our own demise”: On prediction markets.

  • “James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies”: This is how you write an obituary.

  • “The Tragedy Of “Stomp Clap Hey””: A reflection after Gen Z (or Alpha, who knows?) decided a song I had never (consciously) heard before called “Home” from over 15 years ago is maybe the worst song of all time.

  • “In Search Of AI Psychosis”: The subtitle is great: “Folie a deux ex machina.”

  • “America Tips Into Fascism”: You may disagree - I certainly think the midterms will change things if a) they happen and b) the economy sucks enough - but it’s hard to argue with the litany of abuses listed here. Something has changed in the United States. I suspect they will not be able to back.

What I’m Listening to:

  • Behind the Bastards:

  • Canadaland: Commons: “Pandemic”:

  • Darknet Diaries:

    • “Hieu”: This is a good, if self-righteous, episode partially about the problems with the US’ Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. One thing I never stop being frustrated about is that the people who complain about government overreach in the US don’t care about legislation like this. Hell, some of them voted for it.

    • “MG”: This guy built a USB cable that hacks computers.

  • Drinks Insider: “From Prohibition to Neo-Temperance”: As you know, I like alcohol. So this is preaching to the choir of me. But you’d think there was all this evidence to suggest that banning vice doesn’t actually reduce vice.

  • New Heights:

    • “Taylor Swift on Reclaiming Her Masters, Wrapping The Eras Tour, and The Life of a Showgirl”: Swift’s first ever podcast. I listened to the first part of this because I was interested in the masters conversation. I got most of what I wanted but I’m still not 100% clear on the line between only owning your publishing (which she already did) and owning your master recordings. I get why she did it - I would too if I was a billionaire recording artist who didn’t own all my master recordings - but I also would have liked a little more details on exactly what the VCs who used to own them could and couldn’t do with those recordings if she had not purchased them back.

  • In the Dark: Season 3: There are people who believe that the US being the hegemon – the global cop – was good for the world. Those people usually argue that the USSR or some other country would have been worse. They usually argue it is naive to believe there was some other possibility than a hegemon so they think it was best that it was the US and not a dictatorship. I think the evidence argues pretty strongly against the idea that US as global cop was a net benefit for humanity. And this is one of the stories of people whose lives were destroyed by Americans for nothing they ever did to anyone, least of all Americans. The case is 20 years old now, but it still makes my blood boil. (One former soldier hilariously says he’s against “investigative journalism.” Imagine thinking the powerful should be able to do whatever they want at all times and nobody should look into it.)

  • Reply All:

    • “Negative Mount Pleasant”: A fascinating - and infuriating - episode about one of Trump’s first attempts to bring manufacturing back to the US. You’ll be shocked to learn that it hasn’t exactly gone according to plan.

    • “Surefire Investigations”: It’s kind of sad/depressing to hear these guys laughing at Jacob Wohl and not knowing that what they thought was funny in 2018 was actually dangerous in 2025.

    • “The Snapchat Thief”: This is one of those great internet stories where a journalist goes and finds the dicks on the internet and actually interviews them.

    • “Autumn”: I found this one really hard to relate to.

  • Science Vs.:

What I’m Watching: