reading.

Books on the shelf, and things I’m reading around the web.

./from-the-web

things i’m reading, not necessarily endorsing.

August 2026

  1. Sangita Myska: Is Jason Arday a fantasist or a victim of racism? Actually, he’s both ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Sangita Myska · The Nerve

    The former professor’s claims about his extraordinary life do not bear scrutiny. But the frenzied and vicious reporting about him is impugning the good name of every black academic

July 2026

  1. All the Cool Kids Are Birding ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Rachel Gutman-Wei · The Atlantic

    A younger crowd is flocking to a hobby once dominated by retirees—and transforming it along the way.

  2. I Hate The Way We Talk Online ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Jason Toney

    Jason Toney on algorithm-speak, main character energy, and why a simple question about music charts revealed how badly we've forgotten how to talk to each other online."

  3. The organizational cost of low taste ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Aurélie Radom · Medium

    When organizations lose a clear sense of quality, decisions become slow and complicated. Without strong standards, too many options stay open, causing confusion and more meetings. AI creates many possibilities but does not help choose well, making good judgment the key challenge for success.

  4. Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (permalink) ↗ (opens in new tab)

    pluralistic.net

    Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are aggressively trying to silence whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, who exposed serious misconduct at Facebook in her bestselling book. Meta uses strict legal tactics to prevent her from speaking about her experiences, even punishing her for staying silent on stage. This harsh treatment aims to intimidate other former employees and hide the company’s ongoing problems.

  5. The last astronomers ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Joshua Sokol · Science Advances

    Astrophysicists are worried that AI might take over many parts of their work, risking the loss of human skills and creativity. They fear a future where machines produce most research, making it hard to trust and value human scientists. Despite this, some believe AI can help explore the universe if used carefully.

June 2026

  1. The Rise and Fall of the ‘Hipster Music’ Era, 2000-2014: VICE’s Definitive Timeline ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Tony Alpsen · Vice

    An epic odyssey from (what they now call) Indie Sleaze: Part I to Future Islands on Letterman, with (nearly) no Mumford & Sons in sight.

  2. Epicure: Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Jakub Radzikowski, Josef Chen · arXiv.org

    We present Epicure, a family of three sibling skip-gram ingredient embeddings retrained from scratch on a multilingual recipe corpus. We aggregate 4.14M recipes from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English, and normalise the raw ingredient strings to 1,790 canonical entries via an LLM-augmented pipeline. A…