Friday Rundown 05.30.2025
Things to read / watch / listen to this weekend
PODCAST
Read Max: The Silicon Valley Canyon and Malformed Publics
From a little while back, a conversation with
(who has his own excellent Substack), about the canonical tech bro reading list. [Spotify]Andreessen has always been a jerk, but he used to be actually, I thought, a quite interesting jerk. So if he would have things to say, which I would not particularly agree with, but I would read and I would often find interesting… And then I think something broke during COVID and he is, you know, it really feels like he is a large language model, which has been fed on 20 or 30 particular sources.
ESSAYS
Why is There So Much Beauty in the World?
What is beauty? Why do we recognize it?
Flowers exist because animals have eyes; they are a communication between plant and animal, primarily between plants and the insects that pollinate them, like bees and butterflies. Most animals are not very interested in flowers, but some insects certainly are, and the evolution of flowers have happened in response to these insects seeing them.
Maybe AI *Can* "Write" a Maya C. Popa Poem
Wherein the poet issues a challenge
Ok, this was clearly AI trying to butter me up for the experiment. Next came the actual assignment—could AI produce a Popa poem? And, friends, this is where I learned it could undertake the task and not fail as miserably as I might have hoped…
JD Vance and the Honky Tonk Man
Why Vance, “MAGA’s thirstiest try-hard,” won’t inherit the Trump faithful
In politics, there is an inside game and an outside game.
The outside game is popular support—it’s when a figure harnesses public sentiment to capture political power. The inside game is more about attaining power by mastering the elites. The two ur-examples here in politics are Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.
In professional wresting there is also an ur-example. Let me tell you a story about Hulk Hogan and the Honky Tonk Man.
College English majors can't read
More hand-wringing about the current generation of high school and college students.
These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.
MISC
Tech bros inventing things that already exist
