A Year of Newsletters
Happy New Year!
I sent my first weekend newsletter a little over a year ago, on December 26th, 2020. I've now sent one every weekend for the past 53 weekends.
As you know, I just share links to things that have caught my eye during the week. These could be articles, videos, books, poems, podcasts – you name it.
As we begin 2022, I'd love to hear from you. Would you be disappointed if I stopped sending these weekend newsletters? If yes, please reply to this email to let me know.
About 2,000 people now subscribe to this mailing list, including some of the smartest people I know (I'm very lucky to have you all as subscribers!). Based on the proportion of affirmative responses to this email – that is, if enough people are finding my newsletters valuable – I'll keep sharing them.
In other news, my first podcast of 2022 will be released tomorrow! Because you're on this mailing list, I'll send you an email letting you know once it's published.
And finally, here are some links to things I've been reading or watching that you might also enjoy:
1. 'The Bounds of Unknowledge', an article by George Shackle, the little-known English economist who kept the flame of Knightian / Keynesian uncertainty alive during the post-war period.
2. The great biologist and ant expert E. O. Wilson passed away during the week. I'll be discussing some of my favourite books of his in tomorrow's podcast. Here is a video interview he did with The New York Times in 2008, published only recently. And here is Alice Dreger's 2009 interview with him for her book Galileo's Middle Finger, re-published in Quillette.
3. 'Ten Minutes with Sam Altman', a short, quirky blog post on LessWrong. Via Scott Alexander.
4. 'Influenza in Maryland: Preliminary Statistics of Certain Localities', the 1919 study by W. H. Frost and Edgar Sydenstricker that pioneered the method of 'excess mortality'. An explainer by Karen Kruse Thomas here.
5. 'Marc Andreessen On Productivity, Scheduling, Reading Habits, Work, and More', an interview re-published in a16z's Future.
Wishing you a happy and productive 2022,
Joe