September Links

What I'm reading

Author

Riley Haas
October 06, 2025

This is a monthly collection of what I am reading and listening to which I usually send out on the last or second last day of the month. I apologize for the delay this month.

What I’m Reading:

  • Haruki Murakami: 1Q84 (2009-10): I have never read Murakami before but, nearly 400 pages in, I’m wondering if this was the right book to start with. He is one of Japan’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. I…don’t love this. I suspect at least some of why I don’t love it is the translation. To give one example, the title probably makes sense in Japanese. It doesn’t really make any sense in English. (The implication, in English, is that Aomame is unsure what century it is. At least that’s how I interpret the way the title is written in English.)

  • Brad Stone: The Everything Store (2013): This is a business book instead but it definitely tries to be at least a little balanced. Its biggest problem is that I am reading it 12 years later, when much has changed. Given that, and given a few other things, it’s not worth your time unless you’re really into business origin stories. But I don’t regret reading it.

  • “Is the "A.I." "bubble" "bursting"?”: I have been waiting for this for at least a year but apparently it’s still not really happening.

  • “Where Does News Come From?”: I know most of you or all of you don’t need to read this. I still remember, well over a decade and a half ago, being blown away by the Tampa Bay Times, which is owned by a non-profit. If only all the billionaires would each create their own journalism non-profits and then walk away from them forever.

  • “Can filtering seawater provide for a thirsty world?”: I remember learning about desalination in junior high and thinking it was going to save the world.

  • “I Am An AI Hater”: As someone who has some Luddite tendencies, I appreciated this.

  • “Notes on the Heavenly Aeroplane”: One particular perspective on what may be escalating political violence in the United States. And, if you must read something more specific about this, here is a different perspective. I tried to avoid reading about it and I felt like maybe I shouldn’t share the latter. However, the point that one reason we have liberalism is to prevent generational feuds is a good one. (And here is a followup to the initial post with an attempt at thinking about this scientifically: “Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence”)

  • “We Are Not Low Creatures”: I do not believe humans can really live on Mars. But this makes the case of going anyway because of a potentially momentous discovery that was drowned out by the above.

  • “Some thoughts on violence”: I thought this was interesting. Apparently I’ve completely given up ignoring what happened.

  • “Connected places are liberal places”: Correlation suggests that, the more connections people have, the less likely they are to be illiberal. That passes my smell test.

  • “The Superyacht, the Billionaire, and a Wildly Improbable Disaster at Sea”: You’ll never guess why this happened.

  • “The War on Terror Template For The Post-Charlie Kirk Crackdown”: Ugh.

  • “Psychology Experiments Are Gardens, Not Digsites”: This an interesting discussion of cognitive biases and framing.

  • “College Sports is Now Just a Monopoly with First-Degree Price Discrimination and a Labor Market with Lopsided Bargaining Power”: An economist tries to understand what happened with NIL etc. I don’t agree with a lot of this, as I think the idea that it was better when players didn’t get paid is totally insane and I also think Americans love their college sports too much to actually give up on them. But it is interesting and a reminder that every change has unintended consequences.

  • “Everyone is pro-Cancel Culture”: At times during the “cancel culture” moral panic, I tried to make this point to people I knew who felt like there really was some kind of threat to society from “cancel culture,” I just didn’t do it this eloquently. I would add to his explanation, though. I think that, in addition to every single one of us supporting “cancellation” of somebody else at some point in our lives, there is also the fact of power. Power imbalances exist in the world, though many of us apparently cannot see them or refuse to see them. To me, the reason why there was a cancel culture/woke moral panic was, in part, because most of the people trying to “cancel” others had no actual real world power, they only had fake social media power. The issue, if there was one, was with how institutions suddenly reacted to those people, as they perceived that power as real for some reason. I was also never convinced by how widespread it was. Things look very, very different when people in positions of government power want to implement cancel culture. To ignore the fact of power, to pretend “The Left” did this first and everyone is reaping what they sowed is disingenuous to put it mildly.

  • “The United States Of Snitches”: I’ve been trying to write something around the broader topic but this got there first.

  • “The Village and the Sewer”: I thought the Blueskyism things was really stupid but this is an interesting reframing and retort to Nate Silver.

  • “Hey @Grok, Is My Brain Melting?”: A balanced piece (in my opinion) about LLMs.

  • “The Most Important Decision You'll Ever Make”: This headline is both a joke on what this is about and, also, a plea to think more consciously about what you consume online.

What I’m Listening to:

  • Behind the Bastards:

  • Canadaland:

    • Commons: “The Police”:

      • “The Secret History of the RCMP”: So this wasn’t very “secret” to me. Maybe I’ve just read more Canadian history than some people but I knew most of this. Despite what the episode implies, I also learned some of it in junior high school. (We had a mock trial of Louis Riel. Didn’t you?)

      • “Julian Fantino”: I lived through this. You would have thought I’d know more about him and his shenanigans. But I was a teenager and then I moved to Quebec. So that’s my excuse.

    • Politics: “The Massive Airplane Canada Seized from Russia”: This was much less interesting than I thought it would be.

  • Darknet Diaries: “Ola”: This is an alarming story about the intersection of technology and arbitrary government power. Judges don’t understand technology well enough to hold the government to account. This is the kind of exercise of arbitrary power that we’re seeing more and more of. Even though this story is about Ecuador, it’s not hard to imagine it happening elsewhere.

  • Hello and Welcome: “Redrafting the Toronto Raptors & Basketball Reference Game with JE Skeets”: I love a redraft.

  • 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.

  • The Zach Lowe Show: Zach is back!

  • The Rapcast: “The Raptors are better than people think”: The analyst who has become famous for her coverage of The Pacers discusses The Raptors (mostly) without referencing the salary cliche that American commentators can’t stop talking about.

  • Reply All:

    • “The Founder”: This feels like a Darknet Diaries episode. It is fascinating but will eventually make you mad when the US government does what it will do.

    • “Robocall: Bang Bang”: One of their deep dives into contemporary tech and its uses. Interesting as always.

    • "The Year of the Wallop": Did you know that Jason Mantzoukas is big into Harry Potter? (Or was in 2019.) Well, now you do.

    • “Reply All's 2018 Year End Extravaganza": These only make sense if you’ve just listened to the year’s episodes, like I just did.

  • Science Vs.:

  • The Bill Simmons Podcast: “Biggest 2024-25 NBA Concerns”: Zach is back.

What I’m Watching