May Links

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:

• David Graeber, David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021): Not a history but really an argumentative historiography. It’s huge. I’m maybe half way through, maybe less.

• Barry Stone: The 50 Greatest Walks in the World (2016): On hold due to the above tome.

• Slime Mold Time Mold: The Mind in the Wheel (2025): This is an e-book that is about making psychology scientific. I am reading it very slowly on their website.

• “Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy”: On the idea that “[representative] democracy is a system in which parties lose elections” and how that is failing in multiple places. The original (incomplete) essay by Eno is here. And the author of this co-wrote a “letter” about something similar.

• “Trading stuff for money”: “like kidneys or blood or babies.”

• “Radioactive Man”: This is a sad story about a man who was likely poisoned from his job with the US military and now his mind has been poisoned by their refusal to help him out. I don’t know what percentage of Trump supporters have had experiences like this but, at some level, you can understand why they want to burn everything down. Now, why they think Trump is the person who will somehow hold the government to account for what it’s done…that’s something else.

• “Talking Our Way Forward”: Years ago, I thought I would start a podcast doing something like this. I didn’t get very far. I still think I should do it. But the threat of fascism in Canada is a lot, lot less severe than in the US.

• “Welcome to slop world”: What if being on the internet now is like suffering from schizophrenia?

• “Back in My Day; How Nostalgia Messes With Our Minds”: I know this. You know this. But apparently enough of the voting public in enough countries do not know this enough that it’s a threat to the endurance of liberal democracy as a political form. It seems like a timely reminder.

• “North Korea Stole your Job”: I have been aware of this story for a bit - there is a Darknet Diaries episode about it, I believe - but this is a good summary.

• “New paradigm for psychology just dropped”: At least one comment says that this is not that original but he also used ChatGPT to do so. (Jesus tapdancing christ, dude.) This is a fascinating idea anyway. I’m going to read the book.

• “In Search Of /r/petfree”: Everyone has petty grievances. Then they go on the internet and they find other people who agree with them. And then they reinforce those grievances. And then they get more angry at the world.

• “AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state”: The headline is kind of hyperbolic but that’s sort of why I wanted to share it.

• “The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID”: This is from a rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) blog in response to commenters claiming there is no evidence that this many Americans died of COVID. Yes, that’s how fucked our information environment is.

• “The All-American Rejects go viral for doing a ‘house party’ tour”: I don’t know this band and couldn’t name a song but this is so cool. I’m convinced if the bands and artists of the world united (especially Taylor Swift and Beyonce) they could kill Live Nation. But until then, this is cool.

• “It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl”: I used to be extremely pro legalization when I was younger and libertarian. Over time my views have evolved for at least a couple reasons. One is that I have come to see harm reduction has more important than freedom of choice in some cases, and that I now know that the societal costs to the public health system are more significant than I understood when this was just a thought experiment for 20-something me. But the other thing is that the drugs got worse, so much worse. Fentanyl is so much worse than older drugs and intellectual arguments about liberty and freedom are no match for it. Two other thoughts about this piece that are only tangentially related: One is that I know way too much about the history of the Portland police to have much faith in greater recriminalization, even though it does seem like that is necessary. And the other is that Jenn and I visited Portland during this crisis and loved it - Portland, not its opiate crisis. It is, of course, easy for us to say it’s not that bad not having to live there.

• “The craziest Tyrese Haliburton stat”: After one of the most insane comeback in NBA playoff history - perhaps the most insane - and three of them in the same playoff by the same team, we learn that Tyrese Haliburton is doing something completely unexpected in clutch situations this year. It’s unsustainable but the question is, how long does he need to continue to be this hot? By the way, I am fully on the Pacers bandwagon.

• “Tribes”: I’m sharing this primarily because of how similar the opening paragraphs are to how I view myself, as not having a tribe, as thinking of myself as Canadian first (the author is American) rather than X-Canadian or Y-Canadian or something else.

• “‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case”: I love this story and I want them to make an American Greed about it.

• “Are Institutions Cool? Kindof!”: On the crisis of institutional media.

• “The new crypto is criming and state coercion, wrapped up into one”: What happened to the crypto libertarians who were against state power?

• “Power as a bad funnel”: This is a digest post but I’m sharing it for the first part, which is an obvious insight worded more clearly than I’ve seen it before: the way power works in our society is a bad selection process for people who could actually do a good job of being in power.

• “Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them” [Paper, PW]: No shit.

• “Expected-utility maximizers don’t maximize utility”: Warning: Math. The TLDR is that expected utility theory predicts “maximum” utility not actual, real work utility. To me, this just confirms my bias that economic theory - or any theory - without reference to reality is nonsense.

• “Pirates of the Ayahuasca”: Everything I’ve read about this sounds terrible.

• “The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin”: DMT without the other ingredients in ayahuasca sounds much better.

What I’m Listening to:

• 30 for 30: Girl Vs. Horse: I gave up on this because it’s a really weird arty memoir about running and epilepsy. I guess I appreciate them branching out but I just didn’t find it that interesting.

• Behind the Bastards:

  • “The Class that made 200 Child Nazis”: This might be the worst episode of the show, at least of those that I have listened to all the way through. (I don’t listen to the book readings because why would I?) 20-ish years ago I read The Lucifer Effect about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It shaped the way I thought about people (like so many men). Years later, I learned it was debunked, because of course it was. It’s unbelievable when you think about it! (So much social psychology falls into this “sounds fishy” but we just eat it up.) This episode is about an experiment that inspired the Stanford Prison Experiment. They are entirely credulous about the account, which mostly seems to come from the person who ran it. (Much like who The Lucifer Effect is written by the guy who ran the more famous experiment.) There’s just no skepticism about it. As someone who now knows how exaggerated these results are, that’s really disappointing. (For example, a real life story that resembles the plot of Lord of the Flies is actually a story of kids striving, not harming each other. Most stories of people transforming into X over the course of a few days are nonsense.) To make matters worse, the whole thing is told by Robert’s protege, Garrison, who is bad at Robert’s job. Also, Garrison is unreliable. He’s Canadian and in a previous episode he got a basic fact about Canada’s political system badly wrong. I just don’t have the trust for him that I do for Robert. And Robert doesn’t try to push back, he just accepts this as gospel. These kids at this school all had agency despite being 15 and, as adults, they also have a vested interest in exaggerating how serious this all was. Also, are any of them Nazis? No, no they’re not. Just a ridiculous episode and way beneath the quality of this show.

  • 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.

• Canadland Commons:

  • “Pandemic”: “33 Dead in Dorval”: Yes I’m 5 years late. But given how we’ve memory-holed this thing I don’t think it’s a bad thing to listen to it now.

  • “Radicals”: “The Last Pandemic”: This is about AIDS activism in Canada.

• Darknet Diaries: “Grifter”: An interesting one about an ‘80s/’90s hacker and carder turned one of the major figures of Defcon and Black Hat.

• The Lowe Post The Zach Lowe Show: My main basketball podcast.

• Reply All:

  • “Pain Funnel”: About the con of drug rehab that emerged with the ACA.

  • "INVCEL": About the invention of “incel.”

• Science Vs.:

  • “The Keto Diet: Can It Supercharge Your Brain and Body?”: I’m not a dieter but after listening to this…I would never ever do this, jesus.

  • “Microplastics: How Worried Should You Be?": The rare episode where the answer is little less “not worried” than normal. (Most Science Vs. episodes about contemporary panics end with “people are exaggerating the problem.”

  • “Have We Crossed the Climate Tipping Point?”: I found this one quite useful. The answer is “maybe but it’s not as bad as you think.”

• The Bill Simmons Podcast: Now that Zach is on the Ringer I’ve found myself listening to Simmons with some regularity for the first time in eons. Zach is on once a week, which is the main reason why, but I also listened to his John Stewart interview and a redraft. I might have overdone it last week so I may just stick to the Zach episodes going forward. (He and Rusillo were, at one point, trying to figure out which movie star’s career did Tim Legler’s broadcasting career most resemble. I am not making this up. It was like 10 minutes. It was the most Bill Simmons conversation I have ever heard and also among the stupidest things I think I have ever encountered on a podcast. What could anyone possibly learn from this? Why would anyone think that’s entertaining? Jesus tapdancing christ.)

What I’m Watching:

• “Back to a Website”: I loved Homestar Runner when I was in university. Occasionally I remember (or they remind me) that they exist.

• Last Week Tonight:

  • “Trump and the Press”: One of the great tragedies of this moment is that there are no brave reporters with access to Trump. (There are many reasons for this, and they’re not all on him. Access journalism is a plague on journalism.) The number of times he and his minions should be called on for the stupid/untruthful shit they say and aren’t appears to be in the thousands at this point and we’re not even 6 months in.

  • “Alliance Defending Freedom”: These people are pieces of shit.

  • “Trump and Deportations”: Though I am now hearing of some successful legal challenges it also seems to be continuing. Yesterday ICE used smoke grenades on a crowd. It is a testament to how little the Right actually cares about individual liberty that this stuff is being cheered on by a portion of the American population.

• “How Live Nation Is Devouring the Live Music Industry”: American politicians should just run on breaking up this company.