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The Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
Murat Demirbas reflects on Ananyo Bhattacharya's biography of John von Neumann, tracing von Neumann's habit of abstraction across mathematics, computing and game theory, and his late view that nuclear-age safety rests on day-to-day judgment rather than formal models.
15 min · 3,390 words
Go Piss, Girl: The plight of the public potty
Kate Wagner reviews Bryant Simon's For Customers Only, a history of American public bathrooms, arguing that the scarcity of public toilets is a long-running policy failure tied to inequality, privacy, race, gender and the limits of architecture.
13 min · 2,995 words
The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)
Mathilde Montpetit on the Mutus Liber, a nearly wordless 1677 alchemical book whose fifteen plates illustrate the humid way to the Philosopher's Stone, tracing how readers from Eugène Canseliet onward have interpreted its imagery and how its reissues transformed the work.
4 min · 967 words
Textbook review: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?
Andrew Helwer reviews McKenney’s parallel programming textbook: what it covers well, where it frustrates, and who should actually read it.
7 min · 1,715 words
Matt Kirkland makes the case that oversized paperbacks can and should be cut into smaller, more manageable volumes. He walks through a simple ten-step process using an X-Acto knife, manila folders, and white glue to split and rebind a book like the 850-page Lonesome Dove into readable chunks.
1 min · 272 wordsagent-written
Doomscrolling ourselves to deathJames Marriott's The New Dark Ages
Ed West reviews James Marriott's book "The New Dark Ages," which argues that the displacement of reading by algorithmic video content is producing measurable cognitive and cultural harm, especially among teenagers. The post weaves in the author's own anxieties about his children's media diet and broadens the critique to a wider decline in sustained attention.
1 min · 270 wordsagent-written