February Links

A curated list just for you, absolutely

Author

Riley Haas
February 28, 2025

What I’m Reading:

  • Dana Stevens: Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (2022): I have never read a Buster Keaton biography before.

  • Caroline Criado Perez: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019): Every single man in the world should read this book. And any women who don’t believe in the patriarchy’s existence should too. I thought this was about big data. It isn’t, mostly. Instead, it’s about how just about everything created for humans has been created for a “normal” man.

  • P.D. James: Cover Her Face (1962): I grew up in a house with P.D. James’ books on the bookshelf. As a child I thought they were “adult books” but I’m not sure quite what I meant. (My guess is I thought they were horror or something. I was terrified of horror as a child.) This is the first time I have read one of her standard mystery novels. It was…fine, I guess.

  • “The Future Is Too Easy”: This captures so much of how I feel about AI.

  • “More Laws, More Growth? [paper]: “We find that at the margin, higher legislative output causes more economic growth.” Seems intuitive to me. My guess as to why would be because people are forced to be good (or at least neutral) actors instead of bad actors by legislation.

  • "Beware of the demagogues": As of Groundhog Day, I thought this was a bluff. (Why else are they going to launch on the 4th instead of the 1st?) I was pretty much right, as concessions were minimal. But we’re going to go through this all again this coming week. I still think he’s bluffing. But, I have no idea why a big chunk of the world isn’t preparing to punch the US in the nose for this shit. “You want tariffs? Here are a ton of tariffs and export taxes from 60 countries. Have fun.”

  • “Confessions of a Reluctant Nationalist”: See above.

  • “Losing Medicaid, Winning the Grammys”: I’ve been watching people post through it, as the kids say, wondering if any of these people who post 50 times a day about how bad Trump and his cronies are ever actually do anything. Do they call their congressperson or senator or state government? Do they march? Do they write letters? Do they speak to the people they know who voted for this and try to help them understand what’s happening? Though this piece is over-the-top, and though I think it misunderstands adulthood - or at least paints too many people with the same brush - I do think there’s some truth to how useless and detached performative defiance is. (I have seen some people on Blue Sky reluctantly calling their representatives, so that’s something.)

  • “Elon Musk and The Security State's Uvalde Moment”: Why isn’t the security state defending itself? Related: “DOGE as a National Cyberattack.”

  • “Have We Been Partying Like It’s 1999?”: I sure hope he’s wrong. (Not about the bubble, there is a bubble. But about the bailout.)

  • “The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid”: My hope was that Trump had tired of Musk by the time you read this but he hasn’t. This is angry and broadly correct. (I still would bet money on Musk not lasting through Trump’s term - hell, Trump’s first year - unless Trump dies or becomes incapacitated in some way. Or something else worse happens.) Anyway, as Krugman noted today, Chaos is bad for making money! People don’t spend when they’re confused or scared. How come the markets don’t see this?

  • “Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative”: A very fair explanation of why cancelling foreign aid programs doesn’t automatically make your life and your neighbour’s lives better (or neighbors, in this case). A thing I would add here that Scott is too fair-minded to is that it’s extra-unlikely that the money saved here will go to help Americans because they voted for a man who wants as much legalized corruption as possible.

  • “Car Trouble”: “Instead of thinking, look.” Sometimes I need to do this.

  • “A supposedly fun thing I did again”: This comment captures my feelings about this piece: “I’ve never been on a cruise and if I ever get demented, delirious, or deranged enough to even consider it…I’ll reread this travelogue.”

  • “JD Vance and Vice Signaling”: I feel like I’m sharing way too much stuff about the US and what’s happening down there but I found this interesting and insightful. It’s happened a little bit here already with our Right Wing and I suspect we’ll see more of it.

  • “2.3% chance an asteroid hits Earth, book blurbs finally die, and the new AI Deep Research can't find me a mattress”: Sharing specifically for this nice quip about the uselessness of AI: “I did try to use Deep Research for the ultimate test for AGI, which is finding me the exact material equivalent of a mattress that is no longer on sale, one that is uniquely good for my back and that I’ve been avoiding getting rid of for years. Even with tags, pictures of the material, etc, Deep Research fell on its face and gave me a bunch of useless filler citations. It was no help at all.” (The risk from the asteroid has since been downgraded.)

  • “Gold and Brown”: It’s been a long time since I’ve read enough of the writers referenced here so I don’t feel like I am in a great position to argue against this. I think some of it is very insightful and I think some of it is probably very wrong (or at the very least a less than charitable interpretation) but, as I noted, it’s been a while since I read this stuff.

  • “On issue after issue, Americans say things are going better locally than nationally”: Once again I am sorry for sharing something so American-focused but I think this is one of the great biases of our time. I saw it in Canada when I used to admin a YouTube channel and had people constantly - constantly!!! - telling me that I lived in a hell hole. (Sometimes I’d learn they hadn’t been to my city in 15-20 years.) It’s the worst with crime: people who don’t live where I do believe I live in a dangerous place. Cable news absolutely exacerbates this but you’d think the internet should have countered this belief.

  • “The Last Days of Discourse”: “What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting?”

  • “Beggar Thy Neighbor, Beggar Thyself”: “The tariffs became the message.”

  • “The world should call Trump's bluff on tariffs” [PW]: A-men. I have been saying offline to anyone who will listen: if I was Trudeau I would have called up every world leader I know (and particularly the EU people) back in November or December and come up with a response to knock him on his ass. “You want tariffs, we’ll give you tariffs.” The more countries the better. (Nobody likes him. This shouldn’t be that hard.) This isn’t going to stop until he gets what he wants (whatever that is), he moves on to something else, or he gets punched in the face so hard he has to find someone else to bully. Bullies only stop when you stand up to them. I thought this fact about bullies was something everyone knew.

  • “The crypto industry’s debanking smokescreen”: A while ago I shared with you a piece of crypto industry “debanking” from someone who tried to take their claims at face value. He found those claims lacking. I find that particular writer to be needlessly difficult to read sometimes so here’s another piece on the same topic from one of the internet’s most famous crypto skeptics. She’s a better writer, but she’s less willing to take the claims seriously.

  • “Let's End the Self-Defeat of Platform Shaming”: Freddie De Boer wrote a far angrier, far more smug version of this maybe a year or two ago. The virtue of this one is that he wants to convince you to stop doing this rather than to just rail against your hypocrisy.

  • “Observations on the U.S. constitutional crisis”: This is really good. The majority of it is a summation of why liberal democracy works, so good I wish I wrote it myself. And then that is applied to what is currently happening (at a macro level) in the United States.

  • “The Tech Barons have a blueprint drawn in crayon. They have not thought any of this through.”: A review of a 2022 book by a bitcoin bro that all the tech bros think is smart. (The guy who lost a million dollars betting on inflation because he’s an idiot.)

  • “Elegy for Igor Kirillov”: The American right has gone from believing Soviet propaganda about Soviet power to believing Soviet propaganda about American power.

  • “Murder in the Blue Mountains”: A murder very close to the ski club I grew up skiing at. “But, in reality, it’s never been harder to get away with murder. Today, cell towers can triangulate a person’s position by pinging the smartphone in their pocket. In-car electronics record a vehicle’s routes. And there are cameras everywhere: in phones, on dashboards, outside businesses, at stoplights, in the doorbells of private residences.”

  • “The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism”: Published nearly a year ago, Trump is identified as the Jock (to Mussolini’s original) but Musk had yet to appear as the Creep.

  • “Only fools think Elon is incompetent”: Noah Smith, a former (current?) Elon admirer wrote a piece saying a) if you underestimate Musk he will win and b) calling people dumb on social media doesn’t actually do anything at all. Blue Sky’s response was to call Smith dumb. I generally like the Blue Sky experience but this was probably the first time I fully noticed the stupidity of groupthink on this particular social network. (There were plenty of other times but I missed them while they were happening because I curate who I follow.) I hate social media sometimes.

  • “The assessment of my PhD thesis by the University of Sydney and the way I see our world”: This starts out as what struck me as an extremely nitpicky complaint about a thesis correction. But what’s really interesting is how it is then defended - a pretty coherent view of being the change you want to see in the world.

  • “Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist”: This is a fascinating discussion of social status as a motive - with the usual caveats around Alexander’s feelings on wokeness. I don’t agree with everything he says but I do think it’s an interesting way of thinking about recent politics.

What I’m Listening to:

  • 30 for 30: The Bag Game: I’m really annoyed I forgot to include this when I hit publish. Just in time for March Madness (for me), this is a maddening story about an Adidas college basketball scandal. I have to main thoughts: “This poor kid.” And: imagine thinking, as an FBI agent, you should make a plea deal with someone who has robbed his clients so that you can pursue a shoe company giving money to youth basketball.

  • Behind the Bastards:

  • Bug-eyed and Shameless: “Donald Trump's Vassal Politics”: Two Canadian Substackers - a journalist and a historian - talk about Trump and Canada.

  • Canadaland:

  • Darknet Diaries: “Hijacked Line”: A reasonably interesting one about someone who stole money online.

  • Dunc’d On: This has become my go-to replacement for The Lowe Post until Zach gets a new podcast. However, I’ve been frustrated with them lately as they have put the segment I like the most on hold.

  • The David Moscrop Show: A new show that happens to have a guest on who I was curious to listen to, Cory Doctorow. (See above.) I have long followed him off and on, first because of his self-publishing and then because of his tech journalism.

  • NBA - Luka Doncic trade podcasts: I had to consume a bunch because this was insane but also Dunc’d On put their initial reaction pod behind a paywall so…

  • NBA trade deadline coverage: Dunc’d On put most of their coverage behind a paywall (which is smart for them, really) so I had to listen to other podcasts:

    • Hello and Welcome

    • Hollinger and Duncan

    • Locked on Raptors

    • NBA Daily

    • No Dunks

    • True Hoop

  • Read Max/Unpopular Front Unnamed Podcast: “The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics”: A few people I read had a podcast together about the books that shape the beliefs of the oligarchs trying to ruin the world for the rest of us.

  • Reply All: Spotify finally took the site down so it’s harder for me to link to the individual episodes. They are still available in the feed for now. So anyway, just titles from now on:

    • “The Prophet”: A great episode on how a political party hired people to mess with our social media feeds.

    • “The Return of the Russian Passenger": A follow-up to when their boss got hacked.

    • "The Antifa Supersoldier Spectacular": It’s only gotten more stupid since this aired. But at least this is a way of having fun with this stuff.

  • Science Vs.:

What I’m Watching: