AI

• “Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World”, Müller et al 2025 (PPO robot controller, with reward-shaping for temperature & noise reduction)

Matters Of Scale:

• “AI in 2025: gestalt”; “2025 letter”, Zhengdong Wang; “Reflections on 2025: The Compute Theory of Everything, grading the homework of a minor deity, and the acoustic preferences of Atlantic salmon”, Samuel Albanie

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Toss a bitcoin to your Lightcone: LW + Lighthaven’s 2026 fundraiser”

• “The Missing 9s: Why Some Movies Have a Hole in Their IMDb Ratings”, David Gros 2025

Politics/Religion

• “Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games”, Putnam 1988

• “Highway to Hitler”, Voigtländer & Voth 2026 (infrastructure projects make good propaganda for authoritarian leaders regardless of economic benefits)

• “Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences”, Agricola et al 2025; “Debunking When Prophecy Fails”, Kelly 2025; “Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?” (Oliver Sacks’s case studies were heavily fictionalized); “‘I wish this guy hadn’t written this book’” (Joseph Mitchell, famed New Yorker writer, falsified some nonfiction profiles)

• “E-cigarette Flavor Restrictions’ Effects on Tobacco Product Sales”, Friedman et al 2024

• “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing”, Harrell & Hoffman 2013

• “High Court grants chancellor a £600m windfall” (looting The National Fund perpetuity)

Psychology/Biology

• “Could Weight Loss Drugs Turn Fat Cats Into Svelte Ozempets? GLP-1 drugs for pets could be the next frontier for the blockbuster weight loss and diabetes drugs”; “Wegovy® pill approved in the US as first oral GLP-1 for weight management”, Novo Nordisk

• “Achievements and Challenges in Facial Transplantation”, Rifkin et al 2018

• “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Ate There”, Yee 2002_24ya; “An Adventure in Stereochemistry: Alice in Mirror Image Land”, Dinan & Yee 2004_22ya; “Where ‘Things Go The Other Way’: The Stereochemistry of Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass World”, O’Leary 2010

• “The Man in the Snow White Cell”, Pribbenow 2004

• “Social Perceptions of Masculinity and Sexual Esteem Are Impacted by Viagra Use, Testosterone, and Sexual Performance”, Hawley et al 2024 (some obvious relationship advice for men here)

• Vibrio natriegens: “Under optimum conditions, and all nutrients provided, the doubling time of V. natriegens can be less than 10 minutes.”

Technology

• “Ironies of automation”, Bainbridge 1983

• “30 years later: lessons from the Multics security evaluation”, Karger & Schell 2002

• “A Review of Criticality Accidents: 2000_26ya AD Revision”, McLaughlin et al 2000

• “Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders”, Tony L. Trupp 2025

• “From NAND to Tetris”

• “Towards an API for the real numbers”, Boehm 2020 (“good design is invisible”)

• “Boléro: I perform Maurice Ravel on a variety of homemade 8-bit instruments”, Linus Akesson 2025

Economics

• “Digital Distractions with Peer Influence: The Impact of Mobile App Usage on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes”, Jia et al 2025

Philosophy

Fiction

• “Postcard From 1952”, Explosions in The Sky (2012_14ya)

• “The Cinnamon Peeler”, Ondaatje 1989