I mentioned this in my latest Time Well Spent (a recurring feature of my newsletter), but I’ve started a collab with a firm called dry.io. On its website they say they want to “Build tools that let your team and your community work how you want.” For over a decade many of you have been reading me via my Total Content Feed, but I now have a new way to interact with all of my content thanks to dry.io, a landing page that pulls from all the various places that I drop content. They also have a nice search engine.
I tend to assume my long-time readers are the first to find my content in other far-flung forums, but just in case not, I want to alert everyone to a free daily series of five pieces I’ve been releasing this week on Substack. Think of it as a little thank you to everyone who was so quick to subscribe when I launched, and a quick sampler of some of my core themes and obsessions for those still weighing whether to sign on for the Substack paid content stream (a combination of occasional deep dives in a written format + weekly (or more frequent) podcasts, as well as the gated comment community).
Whether I remember to cross-promote here on the blog or not, you’ll get automatically alerted to these occasional free releases if you’re on the free Substack list, so whether paid or free, I hope you’ll take a second to get on my Substack list today.
In the late 2000s Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen made waves arguing that technological progress had declined since the middle of the 20th century. Having spent my adulthood in the period between 2000 and 2020, I was quite open to the idea. I watched the Jetsons. We don’t live in the world of the Jetsons.
Day 2, I made the case that to begin to understand China today, you really need to know your Zhou, a pervasive influence on Chinese society down to the present day that dates back 3000 years:
It’s a meme that China has “5,000 years of history.” This is false. The first historically attested dynasty is the Shang, which emerged approximately 3,600 years ago. And even the Shang are semi-historical, insofar as many of the details of the Shang society and state are known only superficially. The Shang are shadows to us, not flesh and blood narratives.
Day 3, Today, IQ gets its due: I look back over centuries of human achievement and interest in such measurement. And then I examine what history suggests might await us as we pitch out this long-used bulwark against entrenched elite hoarding of prestige opportunities:
Homo sapiens are very smart. They are very smart because they have large brains. This is not controversial. In relation to our body size, humans have bulging craniums housing large brains. About 20% of our caloric intake feeds our brain when we’re resting even though it’s only 2% of our body weight. It’s a calorically expensive organ.
Day 4 and Day 5 remain.
And if you’re one of those still considering whether to sign up for the paidSubstack or whether to give it as a gift this holiday season, now’s a good time to lock in the forum’s lowest allowed pricing. I’ll be adjusting it up after the new year.
Just a quick update. I’ve put up a couple of podcasts at the substack for subscribers. I’ll be “front-loading” the podcasts before getting into a ~1 week groove. I will ungate after a few weeks and port them over to a new podcast that will push to Apple, etc.
The first substack essay I’m planning is a “short history of the world: genetics edition.” Basically, it will be a “core dump.” I think it will be “news you can use” for a lot of people.
Thanks to all the readers who subscribed! Lots of familiar emails.
Some people still read blogs. Though not too many Zoomers apparently. Here is a thread if you want to unlurk…seems like the comments are dominated now by about a dozen individuals.
Perhaps some things to say:
– how long you’ve read – where you live – what you do – why you read
I spent some time trying to lock down the issue with this website. It’s back online again. Apparently, it was getting hit with too many requests and it was taking down the shared host it’s on (CPU problems). I’ve installed a bunch of caching and other features (including blocking bad crawlers).