February 2021

March 3, 2021

This update is a few days late, but for good reason! I've been in in Three Rivers, California and in Sequoia National Park, home to some of the largest individual trees on the planet.

Reading

Portfolio Society was, surprisingly, a decent introduction to both finance and Marx. It’s quite readable, and it’s endearingly goofy - there’s a half page in the endnotes that imagines characters in The Lion King worrying about saving for their child’s college education.

Skin in the Game was fine. Some things I agreed with, some I didn't, but I wasn't convinced much either way. I do think that Taleb's explicit emphasis on ethics should be praised. Branko Milanovic talks about this in further detail in his piece about Taleb's system and how it goes "from empirics to ethics."

Another month, another book about Minsky. Why Minsky Matters is an accessible survey of Minsky's work, and it's great. I also read an article, The Minsky Millennium, that looks more closely at Minksy's politics. I'd recommend them both.

I read The Stranger in one evening. It's been years since I've read a novel, and I had almost forgotten what it was like to be pulled into fiction.

Deschooling Society is about why the institution of school is bad. This book rules. It's also terribly naive, and the author places a great deal of faith in markets, networks, individuals - basically everything that's not school. Still, I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time. Ivan Illich threw a lot at the wall, but what did stick really stuck.

Watching

The Kid Detective is a dark-ish comedy that's better than it has any right to be.

I went in pretty blind to The Killing of a Sacred Deer and liked it a lot. I particularly enjoyed all the actors' formal, mannered delivery which gave the film the feeling of being a stage play. I'd recommend avoiding the trailer if you intend on watching the movie.

Programming

I'm now two and half weeks into Recurse Center, and I've spent most of my time thus far working through Crafting Interpreters. It's been a joy to read, and I can't recommend the book strongly enough. I just finished my implementation of a tree-walk interpreter in Python.