July Links

What I'm reading

Author

Riley Haas
July 31, 2025

This is a monthly post in which I share everything serious I’ve been reading for the last month, the podcasts I’ve been listening to and online videos that I’ve watched. I include the books I am reading, even though they are not links, because where else would I tell you about them?

What I’m Reading:

  • Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992): I’m not a sci-fi guy so reading this stuff is always a bit jarring for me. On the one hand, it feels clearly hugely influential (and not always in a good way) on our current culture. On the other, so much of it is so insanely anachronistic. It’s like you have to read these books when they come out or they lose a lot of their power.

  • Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940): A moving novel about emotional and sociopolitical isolation in the South in the years prior to WWII.

  • Barry Stone: The 50 Greatest Walks in the World (2016): This is an extraordinarily frustrating and biased list of the “50 greatest walks” of the world that seems to be part of some British series called The 50. This book should be called either The 50 Greatest Walks for British People or 30+ Great British Walks Plus Some Others or something like that. It has at least two massive flaws as well as some other lesser issues. Unless you are British or from the British Isles, or really, really love the British Isles as a hiking destination, it’s really hard to know why you should read this book.

  • Slime Mold, Time Mold: The Mind in the Wheel (2025): This is a serious, ambitious and admirable attempt to create a new/old paradigm in psychology. Really, it’s more of an attempt to revive a failed attempt from the past. We all know about the “Replication Crisis.” What fewer of us know is that psychology is, in the words of Adam Mastroianni, pre-paradigmatic. If you are at all interested in any of this, or just interested in how we learn about how people are, I strongly recommend reading it. It’s free at the link.

  • “No notes”: On what it was like to have an inspirational sports executive who actually delivered on his promise.

  • “Don't mess with the Zohran”: I have tried to pay as little attention to this as possible because a) it was a Democratic primary, not even an election, b) a primary for a mayoral election for a city in another country. However, I think this post on dirt digging on public figures is really interesting and aligns with my feelings.

  • “Gerontocracy is everywhere”: About the US but applicable, to some extent, to our country as well. And it’s only going to get worse, I suspect.

  • “Nobody Wants to Hear Good News About Psychiatric Medicine”: I honestly think this applies more broadly to medicine. There are big breakthroughs all the time that get so little attention or get this “yeah but, this tiny minority group hasn’t been cured yet!” attention. We live in a time of medical miracles and nobody seems to know or care. (Or, as with the COVID vaccines, they think the miracles are sinister.)

  • “Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity”: I don’t code but I am not shocked to hear this given how many “vibe coding” projects I hear about which are garbage. This is the way it is with writing. Outlines are fine but paragraphs need to be rewritten by a human and arguably take more time than if a (good) human writer wrote them.

  • “The secret to Baltimore's extraordinary year”: It’s almost as if the reason these types of policies usually fail is not because they don’t work but because municipalities cannot commit to them long enough for them to be effective.

  • “The Enshittification of American Power”: I’m not sure if the metaphor quite holds… Related: Why Canada needs to build a public cloud.

  • “My Family and the Flood: A Firsthand Account”: This is awful.

  • “Conversations With a Hit Man”: I don’t believe hit men exist. It’s not that I reject people taking money to kill others - that happens all the time. It’s more the idea that there are people who spend their entire lives professionally killing people for money as their sole occupation that I think is a creation our imaginations. There’s a Netflix documentary called The Confession Killer about [SPOILER] a murderer that tries to take credit for as many murders as he can, regardless of how ridiculous or physically impossible. And the police just believe him. People lie. Never underestimate the desire of people to believe lies that satisfy.

  • “Extropia's Children Redux” [2022]: If, like me, you wonder what the hell happened in the tech world that caused the Accelerationist Vs. Doomer debate you might be interested in reading about a mailing list from the 1990s whose members have gone on to be hugely influential in AI, the rationalist community and EA.

  • “Joe Rogan is Still Hiding”: You know this, I know this. There are way too many people who don’t. An update of “Joe Rogan, Parody of the Open Mind.”

  • “Stop Inventing Nazis When the Real Ones Are Right in Front of You”: One of the many reasons the Left cannot gain political power is because individual supporters of the left invent boogeymen (boogeywomen?) out of whole cloth to freak out about. All the time.

  • “Mark Carney is going “elbows down” against Big Tech”: Not great, Bob.

  • “A Man on the Street, A Movement of Weaklings”: As much as I try (and fail) not to subject you to too much stuff about American politics, this is by a Canadian and I thought it was worth sharing.

What I’m Listening to:

  • Behind the Bastards:

    • “The Family That Stole Malaysia”: This is actually about Sarawak, I think. (I am only half way through.) Still a crazy story.

    • “RAM: Nazi Fight Club/Lifestyle Fascism”: This is hosted by Robert’s protegee, a Canadian expat named Garrison. Ever since his first appearance as a guest, where he got a basic fact about his home country of Canada wrong, I have not liked him. Here’s it just…he’s not Robert. He’s not good as hosting. Robert is. It’s like he’s never done this before. I didn’t finish this one because I just really don’t like these.

  • Canadaland: “How a Canadian Teenager Stole a Record Company”: This is a wild story about voicemail hacking. I have no idea how reliable he is and how much of this is actually true but it’s an insane story.

  • Darknet Diaries:

    • “Greg”: Some interesting hacking and pen test stories.

  • Gone Medieval: “How to be an Atheist in the Middle Ages”: Jenn sent me this and I found it so interesting I added the guest’s book to my list.

  • In the Dark: “The Runaway Princesses”: More exciting than the New Yorker piece I read years ago. Somebody should make a movie.

  • Reply All:

    • "The Crime Machine”: A two-parter and one of their best. I don’t know what it has to do with the internet but it’s really interesting. Remember CompStat meetings from The Wire? Well this is how CompStat was invented and how a system meant to target the worst offenders in a city was turned into a system that promotes targeting innocent people and downgrading serious offenses.

    • "Alex Jones Dramageddon": This is just a Yes Yes No but what’s scary about it as how much of a joke they think this all is. (I did too, at the time.) They couldn’t have known, of course, but we were all so naive.

    • "All My Pets": Just a horrifying episode about being a YouTube star. Just horrifying.

    • "The Magic Store": Even in 2018 Amazon was getting worse.

  • Science Vs.:

  • Search Engine: “The Dave and Busters Anomaly”: This podcast is the sequel to the Reply All and I’ll probably listen to the whole show at some point. But someone mentioned this and I had to listen.

  • Unpopular Front X Read Max Unnamed Podcast: “Steelmanning Peter Thiel”: For years now, I have been trying to understand why the tech world and now The Right thinks Peter Thiel is really smart. (Did you see the op-ed he wrote after the inauguration? It was nonsensical and kind of insane.) I can’t stand to watch him or listen to him talk so, in this case, I listened to two people (who think he is wrong about almost everything) try to understand what he was trying to say in his most recent viral interview. All I can conclude is that, some people reach a level of wealth where nobody will ever disagree with them. And when that happens, they eventually lose the capacity to defend their thoughts in any coherent way.

What I’m Watching:

  • What Makes This Song Stink: “Little Stinkers Episode 5”: It’s been a bit since I watched this channel but…the state of modern “country” is not good, folks.

  • “Inside NPR's Tiny Desk Concert Set”: Now I kind of want to watch every single episode of Tiny Desk. (Usually I only watch them when I hear about an artist I like performing or someone tells me I have to watch one.)

  • “China's Rotting Mansion Cities”: This is from a group of channels Jenn watches regularly. This is not the first video we’ve watched about crazy dictatorship infrastructure insanity but the first one I didn’t watch while falling asleep so it’s the first time I’ve shared one.