The purpose of art is to delight us; certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that. — David Mamet
This clever confection is a mystery about murderers who don’t kill people and murders that mysterious do not occur. It’s spun sugar, but in the days after the murder of Alex Pretti, perhaps confectionery is what we require.
January 27, 2026 (permalink)
No one talks about curating one’s reading list.
In the long run, I’m writing (or hoping to write) a book about information, computation, and understanding. One part of that is Byzantium. What we know about antiquity, we chiefly know because Byzantium managed to preserve it, and how they managed that is part of the history of information. I know very little about Byzantium, and this is a fine and detailed history.
But Byzantium spanned a millennium and change between Diocletian and Constantine XI Paileologos, and this book is a veritable brick, and the world is changing around us. It always is, of course, but AI: you can talk to machines! It’s a fairy tale worthy of Pandamus or Grimm!
June 6, 2026 (permalink)
For some time, I’ve needed a sounder foundation for my claim (in Uncle Fred’s Book) that Jews are inclined to argue. It’s true, as my cousin reminds me, that this goes without saying and really needs no justification. I want to have the footnote, just in case.
This is perfect. I’ve been reading a lot of Twitter from Fania Oz-Salzberger about October 7 and the ensuing war; she, along with Simon Schama and Simon Sebag-Montefiori, has made consistent good sense.
This volume a wonderful essay on strong women in (and out of) the Bible, some terrific notes on humor, and demonstrates a wonderful (and I think sound) approach to the problem that the ultra-orthodox pose to secular Jews.
Also, this was a delightful read.
January 19, 2026 (permalink)
Winner of a Hugo for Best Novella, this is the story of a tea monk — a sort of itinerant psychotherapist — who meets a robot on the road. Robots were emancipated long ago, and long ago they left and absented themselves in the wilderness. Now, a volunteer has been sent to check up on how the humans are doing. The result is very heavy on exposition, and indeed nearly everything here is exposition. The robot, whose name is Splendid Speckled Mosscap, owes something to Iain M. Banks but is exceptionally well drawn.
January 22, 2026 (permalink)
A fascinating research report from a fascinating researcher. Wolfram studies cellular automata, which are very small and simple models of abstract computation in which each “cell” adjusts its state according to the state of some number of neighbors. These automata are even simpler than neural networks, but they, too, can learn. It appears that machine learning, in this case at least and perhaps in all cases, including animals and people, may be a matter of sampling lots of abstract computations and refining those that seem to have some slight utility for addressing the current situation.
January 4, 2026 (permalink)
