Subscriber Links Roundup #3 (May 17, 2023)
Third batch
Reminder:
I’m delivering a series of lectures on the psychology of social status in Miami from May 31-June 2. If you’d like to attend, please complete this form.
Here is the third batch of subscriber writing links. You can access the first batch here and the second here.
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Sarkin Makka, REALITY CHEQUE
The dynamics of how people from different social classes behave when they have access to money, status and wealth.
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Sam Dogen, Financial Samurai: Be Rich, Not Famous: The Joy Of Being A Nobody
Some interesting perspectives as to why it's best to fly under the radar and be a nobody.
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Yuri Bezmenov, How To Make Substack the Greatest Subscription Network of All Time
A dissident’s guide to modern urban progressive life through sarcasm, memes, and data.
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Vaishali Iyer, The Long and Short of Stress (Part I)
An embodied perspective on stress and how to deal with it.
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Andrew Mullen, "The Artist of the People's Suffering: Bolaño, Balenciaga, and the Femicides of Ciudad Juárez"
Reflections on a life spent reading, Roberto Bolaño's 2666, and the reprise of 1970s Latin America.
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Reflections on the Spirit of the Age... with its tendencies towards a performative, fashion-accessory kind of piety originating in our Western feel-good factories of academe.
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Joshua T. Carback, King Mob and Contempt of Congress
This article puts the Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021, into historical perspective and makes recommendations of how the U.S. Congress should better protective itself.
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Henrik Karlsson, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
An account of how to find intellectual community online by thinking in public.
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Micah E. Weiss, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . . . Part 2 The kids are not alright
How we should stop letting kids have social media accounts, and maybe even phones at all, and be better parents.
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Jaireet Chahal, Mathematical Patterns [Week #9]
This is from my math newsletter where we go over a famous unsolved math problem in a fun and intuitive way for readers of all backgrounds to understand.
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Connor Collins, Profaning the Blue Check
What had been a sacred symbol, an in-group signifier of status, and a heuristic for lazy partisans became a profane mundanity.
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John McGee, Romeo & Juliet—A Satire?
Argues we’ve completely misinterpreted Shakespeare’s best-known play.
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kev, Sophie's Louis Vuitton bag & an interview with Zara's heir
Where we discover the first and only Louis Vuitton’s bag Sophie owns, its backstory and why this possessions is so special to her.
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The Opium Trade and the Foundations of American Industrial Capitalism
A history of the 19th century Opium Trade, explaining how the fortunes it created and the relationships it fostered provided the capital that bootstarted America's industrial revolution and how it impacts Sino-American relations to this day.
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Meron Langsner, Dramaturgy of the Duels in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s HAMILTON
An analysis of pistol dueling in the story structure of the most popular musical in recent history.
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Imbas Forosnai, Four Kings
Inspired by directional ritual magic, this four-part piece explores beginning and endings over time, and the way we manage them as we age.
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Chris Grier, Grier’s Notes Substack
Grier's Notes offers a regular round up of world politics and news plus other items of interest of things that I have been reading or thinking about recently.
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Nicolás Forero, Good and Evil Are Subjective, but Should We Let Them Be?
There are infinite values from which to see the world, thus, what is right or wrong depends on the values people choose.
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Daniel Zahler, How I Overcame Panic Attacks
I share my personal journey of suffering from panic attacks -- figuring out what was causing them, identifying the root causes, and coming up with science-backed solutions to prevent them.
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Jason Powers, MP3: The Hierarchy of Horrible Humans
The hierarchy in place that makes for very bad outcomes for humanity.
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Brian Leli, Body Positivity's Flaw
External acceptance is a false road to self-worth.
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Sue Moore, Brand naming & copy psychology
A 5-step framework for choosing names, with insight on the psychology behind the language you use.
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Dr S Robin, Our Reality
What we are and how we think, packed full of examples so that you can check the text.
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Liam Smith, Police Violence is 9x more Gendered than Racialized
Why is it taboo to say that half the victims of police violence come from one minority...white males?
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James Harris, ‘Why are Young Men So Angry?’
The piece is about the problems with our discourse treating all ‘straight white men’ as the same, ignoring the power differentials men experience across different points of their life.
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Jon Messinger, The Scenic Route
This piece contextualizes the work-life narrative in today’s world, with thoughts on what may make sense for individuals early on in their careers (like myself).
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Murray Lytle, Indeterminacy and Consciousness
I write my substack to point out, using historical and philosophical references and personal experience, that the world is not Manichean but complex and this piece examines artificial intelligence through a worldview lens that recognizes the indeterminacy of consciousness.
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Tim Werner, HUMAN | nature
This is a non-fiction novella - a portrait of my aging but charismatic father as told through the travails and triumphs of a 3-generation backpacking trip to Isle Royale National Park when he was 74 years old.
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Rene Walter, The AI-risk of a synthetic Theory of Mind
In which i write about why the AI anthropomophization-trap runs deep and why we have no choice but to develop a synthetic theory of mind for robots.
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Nigel Bowen, Are content creators finally getting their due?
Why the rise of platforms such as OnlyFans should excite long-suffering content creators.
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Jorg Mardian, The Health Ambush of Fake Meats
Debating the supposed health promoting values of plant based and lab grown meats.
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Sjoerd Bekius, The Incomplete Male Stereotype: You Can’t Always Be Strong
In this piece I argue against the idea of breaking the male stereotype of the strong man, but invite people to add to it the possibility for men to talk about their feelings so that they can be both useful members of society by acting in hard situation without destroying themselves from the inside by never talking about their experience.
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Ann Rawson, Too Much Tea
A short memoir inspired by my regret about the time I helped a landlady shame an old war hero.
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Aaron Kara, Life Is Shit and Then You Die resilience, class and the crucible of life
A personal essay about how a hard life is a lesson in resilience and why we should test the strength of our virtues through experience (why elites don't do this).
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J.E. Petersen, Candy! Candy everywhere!
The case for an Ascetic Economy, as a counterbalancing force in our Wonka World of Consumerism.
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Sarvasv Kulpati, Intelligence Doesn't Exist. Let's Talk Aptitude Instead
Why intelligence is an outdated concept and why we need to move past it
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George Gillett, Everything, Everywhere: the wildly surreal film that captured our own unreality
The piece explores the themes underlying the popularity of the Oscar-winning film 'Everything Everywhere All at Once', including its representation of coming-of-age during the internet & attention economy era.
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Jeff Sullivan, Evolutionary Mismatch: Nomadic Apes Sitting Inside On iPhones
Exploring the main ideas of evolutionary mismatch and its implications.
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Jacob Himbert, Livegodly
A newsletter depicting my own self-discovery route wanting to shed light on things too often unsaid.
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Harry Robson, The absence of public ownership and planning is holding back our country
A piece examining the economic history of New Zealand, current trends in economic thinking, and the role public ownership and planning may have to play in addressing structural issues in the economy.
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Emmanuel Jegede, On Gratitude: How To Stay Awake In A Lulling World
An essay that describes the subjective origins of ingratitude and outlines its degenerative effects as well as how to combat them.
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Gabriel Prado, Stop trying to impress airport personnel
On how trying to cause particular ephemeral impressions leads to bad decision-making.
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Grant Smith, Late Stage Bureaucracy
The widening gap between perception and reality is creating a debt to the truth that the globally homogenized West will ultimately need to pay, a perennial feature of late stage bureaucracy.
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Bobby Hulme-Lippert, Surely There is More to Life: What to Do When You're Stuck in the Waiting Room (of Life)
We are all in a waiting room hoping for something bigger and better - what if the fastest way out is embracing the waiting room we're currently in?
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Nana, Why modern dating is not romantic?
I'm sharing this essay because I want to hear people's thoughts, their stories, and how my observations resonate or disagree with theirs in the modern days of seeking intimate relationship.
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Magus Magnus, Laughing Down Absurdity
A Substack post on how under certain conditions Laughter is the only answer - with three cultural examples.
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David Pinsof, Happiness Is Bullshit
You don't actually want to be happy.
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