March Links

What I'm Reading

Author

Riley Haas
March 30, 2025

What I’m Reading:

  • Marie Favreau: The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (2021): So far this is a history of the Golden Horde, the western half of the Mongol empire, and not so much “how the Mongols changed the world” but it is very interesting. A people and part of the world I know little of.

  • Elmore Leonard: LaBrava (1983): This very much feels like a noir. There doesn’t appear to me a central mystery so much as multiple people with mysterious pasts.

  • Dana Stevens: Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (2022): This is a great book about possibly my favourite American filmmaker of the 1920s, someone who I have never really read much about. Ignore the rather grand subtitle, that’s a bit of a reach.

  • “The Silicon Valley Consensus & AI Capex (Part 1)”: 3 ways in which the AI bubble is a bubble and why they are bad. Ed Zitron is funnier but this guy is a lot less (obviously) angry and a lot better at editing himself.

  • “Trump's Blockade of America” [March 4th]: I sure hope this isn’t relevant any more! (I guess we’ll find out this week!)

  • “If You're So Smart, Why Can't You Die?”: A really interesting piece on AI that is less skeptical than the skeptics and way less doomy than the doomers. A really fair middle ground view.

  • “Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50,000 cash”: A hilariously deep dive into whether or not a scam story (or rather, one aspect of a scam story) in The Cut is true.

  • “My 16-month theanine self-experiment”: N=1 as they note.

  • “The Juggler”: What is Trump doing to the US economy? What is his plan? Maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have one.

  • “Can We Talk About Joy In Wine?”: I hope that I’ve been this way about beer more in the last 5-10 years than I used to be. Do let me know either way.

  • “This thing will fail”: Why conservatives are wrong to project their wants and desires onto Trump and far more wrong to do so with the tech oligarchs who are now supporting him.

  • “Mahmoud Khalil's Detention Is A War on Terror Milestone”: Spencer Ackerman, the preeminent American chronicler of US abuses in the War on Terror, on the abduction of a Green Card holder for disliked political opinions. (There is now a video online of a student visa holder walking down the street and getting disappeared by ICE. This happened this past week. Seems concerning.)

  • “Twilight of the Populists?”: This is optimistic. Hopefully he’s onto something.

  • “The Revolt of the Eighteen”: History doesn’t repeat, they say, it rhymes. Over 100 years ago Canadians hated America because of the threat of free trade. Now we hate America due to tariffs.

  • “The One Rule To Save The NBA”: If you’ve ever watched FIBA you know the NBA doesn’t have to be like this. If you’ve ever watched Canadian university basketball (at least how it used to be played, I haven’t watched it in ages) you know there can be way fewer fouls in basketball. Hell, even US college is better for this stuff than the NBA now. The NBA will be better without foul grifting! Do it already!

  • “Death by klaxon”: It’s good to ignore some things.

  • “Goliath Stoops to Conquer”: On the powerful trying to be viewed as underdogs in political struggles.

  • “Is It Fascism?”: This is pretty short, as you might imagine.

  • “What the [US Federal] Department of Education Actually Does”: This is about the US but, to me, is emblematic of a number of problems with the contemporary Right in liberal democracies. I didn’t know what it did either but then a) I’m Canadian and b) I’m not in favour of firing government employees just because. Anyway, here are three problems I see with the Right that this article makes me think about:

    • The complete lack of curiosity of the voters, many of the politicians and some of the pundits about how things actually work. (And the belief that this lack of knowledge is somehow proof of a conspiracy rather than laziness. My old boss - someone who leans right - once tried to tell me how Canadian elections work having never once voted in his life. He decided votes were bought because [redacted] but he of course had zero personal experience of Canadian elections. Related: when the Right accuses the Left of something conspiratorial, it’s because members of the Right would do that thing if they were in power as we are currently experiencing. See Musk’s behaviour in Wisconsin currently versus historic rightwing claims about George Soros.)

    • The deliberate misrepresentation of how things actually work as a matter of overall political strategy and day-to-day political tactics by those politicians and pundits who actually understand how things work.

    • The outright grift from some of those who know how things work - seeing politics merely as a means to increase their power and/or wealth.

  • “I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped”: Stop traveling to the US. Not just for your own sake but for everyone’s.

  • “Rewarding ideas”: On copyright in the age of AI.

  • “The Woman in the Crosswalk & the Ghost in the Machine”: I like driving [in the country]. I enjoy it [outside of the city]. I’m also a tiny bit of a Luddite. Self-driving cars scare me and also threaten the sense of adventure I get when I drive in a new place. But so far the data shows that self-driving cars are way safer than human-driven cars.

  • “DOGE is About Sex”: This is a fascinating idea to me: men support Trump/Musk because they think they are going to cause enough economic problems to force women to stop working so they will be forced to marry losers who currently can’t get laid. I have no idea how many men actually believe this, but there are quotes in this piece from some men on social media who claim to."

  • “America’s “First Car-Free Neighborhood” Is Going Pretty Good, Actually?": Fascinating. America being America, it’s privately owned, it seems.

  • “How to change the world a lot with a little: Government Watch”: This idea is a more ambitious version of two ideas I’ve had: in my book I proposed a once-in-a-century version to pick a new Canadian constitution and, more recently, I proposed the idea of something similar to this for just Q and As with sitting ministers. I think this idea is better than either of those. I think we desperately need something like this as the mainstream media is failing us, they are failing to hold power to account.

  • “Understanding Solar Energy”: Within the last few years I read a Reddit post where an engineer argued that improvements in solar technology were going to make energy so cheap that it would completely transform the world. (The costs of energy approaching zero would cause the costs of everything to approach zero.) The argument was that the grid wasn’t ready for this much energy and it was at least implied that it was in the interests of elites to not improve the grid in order to preserve the status quo. I don’t remember if I included it in this newsletter but I cannot find the post. Anyway, this is a more conservative view about the promise of solar energy.

  • “Living With a Murderer”: On personal responsibility in the face of fascism.

  • “A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List”: The guy who runs Have I Been Pwned got phished.

  • ““A Wholly Inaccurate Picture”: Reality Cop Show The First 48 and the Wrongly Convicted Man”: I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that The First 48 distorts cases in favour of the prosecution. Just shocked.

What I’m Listening To:

  • 30 for 30:

    • The Sterling Affairs: I listened to this when it came out. Last April, they released a “10 Years Later” episode about how much has changed since the recording came out. This is self-congratulatory and contains at least two wild sentences. The first is when the host says something along the lines of “before Donal Sterling, powerful people were not held to account for the bad things they did but now they are.” I know she was talking about NBA owners but less than 1 year later that sounds so naive it’s laughable. The second ridiculous thing is Mark Spears claiming that Vivek Ranadivé is doing a great job with the Kings.

    • The Bag Game: 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.

    • Through the Flames: This one-episode series is a companion to a doc from the show about Reggie White, which we’ve seen part of but not all of it. This addition, about his church which got burned down, is extremely frustrating. There are stories here - about a government’s failure to follow through on money for low-income loans, about who actually committed the arson, about embezzling the funds for the new church - and none of them are fully told.

  • Behind the Bastards:

    • Behind the Insurrections: In response to January 6th, this is a miniseries about other successful and failed attempts by fascists to usurp democratically-elected governments. I’m only two episodes through it so far. But even though I am four years too late to this series, it feels very, very relevant right now, as you might imagine.

    • “The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented/The Population Control Movement”: This two-parter starts out about a particularly awful birth control device but then gets into the people and motivations behind why such a device was given to people in the Global South after it was discovered it was horribly dangerous.

  • Canadland Commons: “Dynasties”:

    • “The Regans”: I was in high school when this trial happened so I did not pay attention. But it is an absolute outrage. Almost as outrageous is when Canada’s parliament gave this man an ovation in 2015.

    • “The Olands”: This is a fascinating one that is more true crime than typical. At one point members of this family owned both Moosehead and Keiths.

    • “The Desmarais”: I highly recommend listening to this one. If I had heard of this guy, I had forgotten about him. This episode is one of the reasons I listen to this show and I appreciate focusing on powerful Canadian dynasties.

  • Darknet Diaries: “Kingpin”: A great interview with a hardware hacker who once had a show on Discovery that you may have watched. I watched a video a few years ago that this guy made about getting into a bitcoin wallet.

  • Dunc’d On (/Hollinger & Duncan): This has become my go-to replacement for The Lowe Post until Zach gets a new podcast. They are back to doing their regular segment that I like the most, a survey of the league.

  • Hit Parade: “Singing Nuns and Green Tambourines Edition”: I grew up with some of these songs so I was interested to listen to this.

  • Rapcast: “Raptors Rookie Report”: A pretty fair assessment of the Raptors’ rookies this season.

  • Reply All: I have stopped linking the individual episodes due to Spotify making it harder to find them online.

    • “The Bitcoin Hunter”: Trying to find forgotten bitcoin.

    • “Apocalypse Soon”: A really fun “Yes Yes No” segment.

    • “Reply All’s Year End Extravaganza”: An update on the stories of the year which actually made sense to me because I had just listened to some of them

  • Science Vs.:

What I’m Watching:

  • Last Week Tonight:

    • “ICE Detention”: This is 2 weeks old so things have escalated.

    • “Tipping”: I would love it if tipping was ended and people were just paid good wages.

    • “Facebook & Content Moderation”: You’ll note that, though the big tech platforms are apparently all about free speech now, the owners of those platforms still want to suppress the opinions of those who criticize them. (Musk sues them or insults them on Twitter causing his fans to go after them. Zuckerberg has been trying to prevent the publication of a book that is critical of Facebook.)

  • “What happens when you give Americans $1,000 a month?”: An extremely brief video about a UBI experiment.