The most interesting things to read this weekend in July
Credit: James Thompson
Happy Friday. And welcome to a slightly more structured newsletter. It’s been growing like a willow tree the last little while. So I’m going to try to be a little more deliberate in how I care for it and will aim to send it out monthly—instead of, IDK, once every fourth month.
The Most Interesting Things to Read
This week, I want to start with running. I recently ran the Burroughs Loop with my friend Knox Robinson (whose Instagram feed is a gem of short insights into the sport.) At the end, we stopped in the parking lot, exhausted and disappointed that the cold river at the bottom of the mountain had run dry. I had to hustle back to Brooklyn, but Knox yelled “hold on,” just as I was getting into my car. He then pulled out a tiny pink book called “Running” by Lindsay A. Freeman and handed it to me. I’d never seen it before, but I was gripped. It’s a series of short essays on what the sport can feel like and what it means. It’s about running as a queer woman. “When you are racing, you can sometimes have the feeling, as the poet and runner Devin Kelly writes, ‘of being as far along the edge of yourself as possible.’” I also loved this interview with the great author Kathryn Schuz about the sport, and I recently tore through Rich Roll’s memoir of his life and transition from alcoholic schlub to ultra-marathoning elite. Eat those plants everyone.
Outside of running, I enjoyed John Hendrickson’s journey into the mind and appeal of RFK Jr. I loved this essay about Nick Drake, whose life was even lonelier than I had known. I listened to his music on loop my sophomore year in college, entranced by his guitar playing. “Drake had a paradoxical power to touch the emotions of the audience even when it sounded as if he were singing just for himself,” the author writes. (If you want to read about a more popular musician, I highly recommend Tyler Foggatt on Taylor Swift.) Changing pace, I was also swept up in this very, very odd story about meta-crypto-currency grift and deceit. And this piece in the Washington Post about driving a bus in Denver after the wreckage of the pandemic. For listening, I highly recommend this Daily episode about the kids in Montana suing the state for propping up the fossil fuel industry. (And if you’re on a long car ride with kids, I recommend playing “questions” from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. It works for at least 15 minutes.)
Credit: The New Yorker
The Most Interesting Things in Tech
It continues to be an extraordinary year in tech. I’ve been hopping between conferences and events and have recently had the pleasure of interviewing a number of the pioneers in the field. In Paris, I spoke with Yann LeCun: he’s one of the creators of neural networks and he’s very optimistic about our future with AI. He explained both why he thinks the technology has fundamental limitations and also why it generally will pull us toward good outcomes. Then, in Toronto, I spoke with Geoff Hinton, who helped create the field with LeCun, but who’s extremely worried about near- and long-term risks. He explained why he thinks generative AI is quickly outpacing our abilities to understand and control it. The next week, I spoke with the great author Yuval Noah Harari for an AI conference put on by the UN in Geneva. He explained some of the regulatory frameworks that, he believes, can help minimize the harm and maximize the good.
I also loved this essay by Douglas Hofstadter on the mistakes that generative AI made in explaining the origins of Godel, Escher, Bach. For a more technical read on regulating AI, here’s a fascinating framework. And my colleague and partner, Raffi Krikorian, has recently started a terrific pop-up podcast on how to think about the big issues in the field. Meanwhile, Paul Graham has a smart essay about how to figure out what work you should do in your life. “Knowledge,” he writes, “expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.”
Elsewhere in tech, here’s the smartest essay I’ve read about Twitter’s problems. Ending on a positive note, my favorite innovations are a paint that could help us solve climate change, and this incredible work to learn how the navigation of birds can help us understand how the military could navigate in a conflict where GPS gets wiped away.
Last, I’d like to recommend that everyone hike up this mountain in Vermont and meet the monk who is advising the tech industry on how to avoid the apocalypse.
I hope everyone is having a lovely summer. Please forward this newsletter to friends who might enjoy it and please send me the best things to read to put in the next one of these.
cheers * N