Yesterday, I spoke with Mike Solana of the excellent newsletter Pirate Wires, one of the best places anywhere to find some truly heterodox takes about the relationship between tech and politics.
Silver introduces a podcast conversation with Mike Solana about social media and engagement metrics.
Um so, one book is pertinent to the discussion that we had a moment ago, which is called The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. It's written by John Coates, who is an academic economist who then um became a derivatives trader, I think, for Deutsche Bank in New York. And found out that the traders that he studied were really weird, right? Like these traders would have strange physical and mental stress responses to the market rising or falling.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’” (https://nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nate-silver.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Number two, in a totally different direction, um The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. We didn't talk as much about some of the AI stuff today, but at the end of the book there's a pretty long, elaborate comparison between the Manhattan Project and the building of these large language models that some people think um could be potentially very dangerous.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’” (https://nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nate-silver.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
The third is called Addiction by Design um by Natasha Schüll. And Natasha is an NYU anthropologist who studied Las Vegas as like her thesis, basically. She did like a lot of reporting um just about the properties of slot machines and how addictive they are and about the kind of casino gambling industry in general. And of course, she draws metaphors between that and the rest of uh society. Nate Silver. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’” (https://nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nate-silver.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.