Blog AF

I guess this is what happens when I don’t share what I’ve been listening to in over two months. Don’t miss out on the counterpart post, which is just links to some of the best articles I’ve read recently.

• How I Got Into College
  This American Life (Podcast)
  

  Michael Lewis tells an amazing about immigration, education, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how they shape who we are in very unexpected ways. Just listen.

• Let Me Count the Ways
  This American Life (Podcast)
  

  Sharing this one mostly because I’m pissed off about the dumb position that the US is taking on immigration, and the small but effective ways in which the government is curtailing immigration accross the board through its bureaucracy. These changes to the rules are affecting good people, like those who try to follow the rules to enter the US legally, many of whom I know personally, and depending on the luck of the draw might also include me in a few months. 🎉

• Post No Evil
  Radiolab (Podcast)
  

  This episode makes a great point about privilege being geographically bound, which is a recurring topic for me. We can’t agree on values globally, as we don’t all have the same preferences/views. We can’t expect FB (or other companies!) to police that. We can’t make FB, Twitter, or any other company the arbiters of morality globally with a single set of rules. A company can pick what to censor according to one set of beliefs, to be applied equally, or it can respect local belief systems. Since that’s a choice, A company can’t be neutral.

• Building Something People Want to Buy
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Andy Rachleff - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  This another one of those older episodes I decided to go back and revisit. The stories of Benchmark and Wealthfront are interesting on their own, but Rachleff’s experiences running both are also full of great advice for entrepreneurs.

• What You Learn About Business After 12,000 Deals Reviewed, 1,500 Deep Dives, 125 Site Visits, and 7 Portfolio Companies
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Brent Beshore - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  This interview is packed with lots of interesting tidbits about businesses that I am not exposed to, from property management to pet crematoria (yup you read that right). The strategies behind these companies are interesting in and of themselves, but thinking about them in aggregate as part of a fund and ensuring, for example, that there are enough cyclical and counter cyclical businesses in the mix made the conversation for me.

• The Bitcoin Standard
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Saifedean Ammous - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  Ammous is an engaging thinker, and the ideas he pushes are compelling. Hearing economists discuss bitcoin and cryptocurrency from a historical perspective is always more interesting to me than the usual everything is awesome techno-utopic stories pushed by engineers and entrepreneurs. Thinking of crypto from the point of view of monetary policy throughout history is way more interesting than thinking about what role blockchains play right now.

• Crowdsourcing Predictive Models
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Richard Craib - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  I’ve talked about Numerai here in the past, and on my other non-podcast post this week I shared their most recent product. Craib is on to something, and this conversation with Patrick is a great showcase of why what they’re trying to build makes sense in the long run.

• Crypto Security Tokens
  Ted Seides and Stephen McKeon - Capital Allocators (Podcast)
  

  I had never heard of McKeon until this podcast came around, and honestly crypto is only a small part of why this episode is worth listening to. His background in the wine industry gives him a unique perspective about business in general, and his time working on the heavily regulated space of drone startups makes for interesting parallels with the inevitably upcoming round of regulation about to hit the cryptocurrency world. I especially enjoyed his analogies, which make concepts such as thin vs. thick markets especially accessible.

• Seeing the Lux
  Ted Seides, Josh Wolfe - Capital Allocators (Podcast)
  

  Wolfe is one of my favorite Twitter follows. He’s super insightful - seeing the world through the lens of complex sytems can help us understand the networked relationships between people and companies, and this conversation is full of such examples.

• Venezuela's Fugitive Money Traders
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  You probably know, but the political situation in Venezuela is a disaster, and its hyperinflated financial system is an important part of it.

• Big Government Cheese
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Policymaking is not about good intentions. The government tried to help dairy farmers, and in the process not only did it distort the dairy products market for years, but it also sunk a ton of cash into non-fungible assets - cheese!

• The Central (Bankers') Question
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  The Zero Lower Bound, revisited.

• Moneyland
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Strange loopholes around taxation and cross-border exploits are getting more and more common. This is not just the case for huge corporations. Rich people are well incentivized hide vast wealth in assets around the world, but setting up shell companies like matryoshka dolls to hide cash is no longer necessary. Buying real estate in top markets, or leaving valuable art in tax-free ports works just as well. This problem is only going to get worse and worse over time, as access to these tax havens becomes more available.

• Modern Monetary Theory
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Note that this episode was heavily criticized by many people online for its simplified economic explanations, but as an introduction to MMT, it’s probably a good one. In essence, the MMT crowd reminds us that money is just numbers on a spreadsheet, and makes the leap to saying that the government could just spend money by changing its balance sheet - no need to tax to bring in money first. I don’t understand this well enough, so if you have pointers, I’d very much appreciate them.

• New Jersey Wine
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Certain products are all about perception. Luxury items tend to fall in that category, and good wine is right up there, too. The fact that I was half way through watching The Sopranos when I listened to this didn’t help.

• The Crime Machine
  Reply All (Podcast)
  

  This episode of Reply All had me thinking about The Wire the whole time. This is a story about policing, urban development, history, and organizational behavior. How do we incentivize the police to do what it is meant to do (keep us safe!) without also pushing for racist and corrupt behavior? That’s the question that this conversation tries to answer. Don’t miss Part II.

• Rob
  Heavyweight (Podcast)
  

  I’m glad Heavyweight is back. I won’t spoil this, just listen.

• The Mystery of the Kibbutz
  Russ Roberts and Ran Abramitsky - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  The internet is wonderful. I had a question about a topic which I knew about, but mostly anecdotally: the kibbutz. I wanted depth, and asked Russ if he could supply it. He asked me to suggest an expert worth interviewing. I researched a bit and found Abramitsky. Weeks later, my questions were answered, even if there wasn’t much in the episode that I didn’t already know. The success of the kibbutz was related to being small homogeneous units of very motivated people, and its eventual fall came with time, as the motivated people were gone, and other opportunities appeared for their kids and grandkids. The discussion on how the Israeli kibbutz was voluntary (exit was an option!) and comparing it to the coercive Russian kolkhoz was what made this episode most valuable. That’s where my questions had initially come up, and what I learned most about. I had my gap year in Israel when kibbutzim were no longer central, so I didn’t get the kibbutz experience. By now, I don’t think young people can have that experience, but there’s a lot to learn from the experiment. This episode makes the kibbutz ideas accessible to everyone. Thank you for that Ran and Russ!

• The Seven Kinds of Atheism
  Russ Roberts and John Gray - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Religion is always a weird topic for me. Listening to people who have thought about it much more than me is always interesting.

• Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union, and In the First Circle
  Russ Roberts and Kevin McKenna - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  For the past couple of months, Russ had been pushing his listeners to read Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, and offered to host a book club through his podcast. This is the first of a few episodes on the book, discussing the historical context of the novel. These other two older episodes, one on Bukharin and one on Trotsky were super helpful in my quest to understand Solzhenitsyn. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, and hope to write a full blog post on it soon.

• Worker Compensation, Co-determination, and Market Power
  Russ Roberts and Noah Smith - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Hearing Noah and Russ discuss all these topics was wonderful. The conversation about co-determination was not as interesting as the discussion around labor, incentives, and metric measurement. The point about temp agencies reminded me of last year’s NYT piece comparing the bleak job prospects of a janitor at Apple today vs. a janitor at Kodak in the 80s, as well as the discussion about company goals/profit maximization in Tim O’Reilly’s WTF. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for a conversation like the one they alluded to, where each of them presents some indicator to make an argument and the other one has a chance to critique it.

• Cruelty
  Russ Roberts and Paul Bloom - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Having taken Bloom’s class on Coursera earlier this year, I found this conversation a good recap of some of his arguments, which added to a few new ideas made for a great listen. The discussion about Westworld (a show that I’ve never seen) and how people behave with each other versus how they behave with robots or other beings that they believe to be non-human was super interesting.

• The Virtue of Nationalism
  Russ Roberts and Yoram Hazony - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  A conversation worth listening to given our current political environment around the world. I am fascinated with nation states lately, and Hazony believes they’re not going anywhere. He’s against the idea of more global government, and thinks that we should double down on the nation-state. In a way, his arugments mimic what Taleb says at the beginning of Antifragile about Switzerland and its canton system - you want to have multiple sets of policies running in parallel as a way to let the best outcomes rise out of trial and error across the board. With little research to back it up, I think that’s the correct approach, but that the modern nation-state is too large for such trial and error to be productive. Another book to add to the to-read list.

• The House that Came in the Mail
  99% Invisible
  

  An entertaining story of how the designers at Sears shaped the future of tens of thousands of families with these mail-to-order houses. These are still sprinkled all over the US, and people don’t even know about it. The past was weird, and every once in a while it peeks back at us and laughs.

• The Worst Way to Start a City
  99% Invisible
  

  This episode tells the story of a literal land grab. I am happy that 99PI is doing more of these urban origin stories lately.

• The Case Study of Dollar General and Surviving (Thriving!) Retail
  Cal Turner Jr., Jeff Jordan, and Hanne Tidnam - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  This was one of the most enlightening episodes a16z has put out in a while. In part, due to the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Dollar General and their target market, making the stories fascinating, but also because of how little expectations I had from it. Definitely worth a listen.

• Seeing into the Future — Making Decisions, Telling Stories
  Steven Johnson, Chris Dixon, and Sonal Chokshi - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  And yet another a16z conversation that ends up making me add a book to my to read list. Johnson’s new book discusses decision making, and tries to list techniques that can help us make the best decisions in the long term. Our tools go beyond simple pro/con lists, as they should. It made me think of the first finance class I ever took, where we discussed decision trees (notice, not to be confused with in decision trees in the ML world) as a way to make structured decisions, considering all possible scenarios. I probably should use tools like these more often. Maybe reading the book will push me in the right direction.

• Technological Trends, Financial Capital, and the Dynamics of Disruption
  Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  To be honest, I had extremely high expectations from this conversation, given that Dixon and Wilson are two of the most forward thinking people in the tech space. The conversation makes interesting parallels between in-game economies and crypto, as well as the 90s boom and the token markets today.

I guess this is what happens when I don’t share what I’ve been reading in over two months. Don’t miss out on the counterpart post, which is just links to some of the best podcasts I’ve listened to recently.

• Hayekian Communism
  Branko Milanovic - Global Inequality
  

  This description of China as a country where the individuals are celebrated for starting companies, and building capital, while letting the government steers the wheel and is celebrated for its collectivized growth is a strange combination. From the outside, it seems accurate. What puzzles me the most is how people in China trust that the powers that be are not going to take them away for building the wrong thing. The institutions of trust are simply different, and I don’t understand them well enough, and should change that.

• The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech
  Geoffrey Miller - Quillette
  

  Strangely, the week that I read this article there were several pieces where bringing Isaac Newton to the present was used as a thought experiment to exemplify how things have changed. This essay makes the argument that our current push toward political correctness, safe spaces, and restricted speech in academia are curtailing progress. Moreover, the article makes the case that this dispropportionately affects those people who can be categorized as neurodiverse. That much is probably true. The unaddressed question is whether the gains from these policies lead to a net benefit at the expense of those being silenced. That I do not pretend to have an answer for.

• Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland
  Tomasz Tunguz
  

  Title says it all. Between the JOBS act a few years ago, the rise of ICOs, and the changes announced by the SEC a few months ago, the barriers to entry in VC have never been lower. Nevertheless, having access to deals is still what sets firms apart.

• A history of alienation
  Martin Jay - Aeon
  

  Now that I’ve been reading Marx and friends, I kind of want to re-read this one.

• First Mover Disadvantage
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  Short but sweet. This reminded me of Peter Thiel’s quip about wanting to be the last mover in a market, not the first.

• Peak Valley?
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  This is a critique of an article from The Economist which has been making the rounds. San Francisco and the Valley have hundreds of problems, and yet, this is still the best place to start most venture funded businesses.

• Could Index Funds Become Too Popular?
  Ben Carlson - A Wealth of Common Sense
  

  For a while I’ve been wondering about this question myself. If you believe in efficient markets, then there’s always going to be someone there to pick up the $20 from the sidewalk, but at the same time it feels like there must be an effect from the stashes of money flowing to index funds. Could we craft a strategy based on exploiting the added momentum that certain stocks get from being heavily invested in by the Vanguards and Blackrock of the world?

• The Technology Tel
  Joshua Gans - Digitopoly
  

  Over time, I’ve gotten used to thinking of cities and neighborhoods as accidents of path dependence. Here, Gans makes the point that the infrastructure that powers all our modern technology suffers from that same phenomenon. Leapfrogging a step or two in the chain aside, every piece of technology we interact with is directly influenced by the same old ideas, and built atop the same old networks as everything else. People are generally amazed when they hear that the internet runs on huge submarine cables between continents, just like the telegraph used to, but even though our systems are much more advanced these days, they are ultimately just iterations in at least some dimensions.

• A Lockean Theory of Digital Property
  Elaine Ou
  

  An interesting argument against banning/blocking users online. Essentially, Elaine makes an analogy to squatter’s rights, arguing that people’s investment over time in their online presence (say, Alex Jones’ Twitter account) should entitle them to some kind of property rights, and that Twitter, Apple, Cloudflare, or whoever, should not be able to single-mindedly revoke those rights. While in theory this sounds reasonable, it disregards the fact that these companies don’t owe their patrons for the space on the platform, and that the patrons agree to be there under whatever terms of service are presented to them. There is no social contract between the companies and the users, and if the users decide to act in a way that the platform finds harmful to their values (or their bottom line!) they are justified in taking them out.

• Apple Is a Hedge Fund That Makes Phones
  Thomas Gilbert and Christopher Hrdlicka - The Wall Street Journal
  

  This is not really a post about Apple, but about all large companies who invest part of their assets into what the authors deem “risky financial assets, such as corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities, auction-rate securities and equities.” Gilbert and Hrdlicka argue that this should be a regulated space, and that companies should return this capital to shareholders instead of taking advantage of the tax and accounting treatments that these non-operational assets allow for. I am not familiar enough with this topic to make a strong argument either way, but something smells fishy, and this seems like a space worth regulating.

• Innovative Governance Reading list
  Mark Lutter
  

  I was recently introduced to this project, which looks great. After skimming the reading list and adding a bunch of things to my queue, now I’m wondering: what other projects have similarly structured survey lists? I really appreciate the mix of breadth and depth.

• The Conversations that Cryptocurrency Killed
  Sonya Mann - Jacobite
  

  I’m fascinated by the Hirschmanian notions of exit, voice, and loyalty. Here, Mann explains how the rise of cryptocurrencies allow for more use of exit where traditionally people would have leaned on voice. It is exciting to think about how this new technology might reshape the world.

• Norbert's Gambit
  JP Koning - Moneyness
  

  An example of the strange loops that money takes when someone sees through the modern finance system’s leaky abstractions. Specifically, Koning moves money through the stock market in a series of trades to avoid foreign exchange fees.

• Don't Be Evil
  Fred Turner - Logic Magazine
  

  A long piece on Silicon Valley history and ideology, the formation of its origin stories, its organizational structure culture, and its hero-worshipping fantasies. Worth your time.

• Everything to know about digital celebrities and how they could change the world
  Michael Dempsey - Medium
  

  I first heard about digital celebrities during a conversation with Chris Messina. We were discussing the power of voice interfaces, and he brought up Miquela, which just blew my mind. What happens when my niece or my nephews start thinking of me - their uncle who lives far away and never get to see other than through an iPad’s screen - in the same way they think of these characters? What makes me different from Siri, Alexa, or Miquela? This is only starting.

• Programming Languages are not Languages
  Alvaro Videla - Medium
  

  The ecosystem of built-ins and open source libraries around different programming languages can make solving certain problems trivial or nearly impossible. While we should be able to express the same ideas across any turing complete language, thinking of concurrency in Go or Erlang is much simpler than in C or Python. As Alvaro explains, this is not so much because of the language itself acts as a lens through which we see the world, but because each language (and its community!) packages different groups of ideas into self-contained tools and abstractions. When a Java programmer switches over to Lisp, they bring with them a bunch of ideas about how programming should be done, and while they are constrained by the framework of their new tool they also inject their own set of constructs into their new community by creating libraries that others can use and work on top of. In my opinion, the work you can do with a language depends much more on its ecosystem of bolted on tools than its basic syntax.

• An Unstoppable Predictions Marketplace — Introducing Erasure
  Richard Craib - Medium
  

  The people at Numerai are producing some really interesting blockchain ideas - the kind that wouldn’t work on a Postgres DB. This implementation of P2P prediction feeds is one of them.

• Religions, Nations, and Other Useful Fictions
  Alexander Blum - Quillette
  

  Everyone thinks of the “useful fiction” meme as something stemming from Yuval Harari these days, but really it is older. Benedict Anderson discusses it in depth in his Imagined Communities, and others before him have made similar arguments. Ultimately, all of these fictions step in for the sources of objective truths, and in doing so, they are useful.

• In India, gold prices affect dowries and girls' survival
  Sonia Bhalotra - Quartz
  

  This is very messed up, but not too surprising. “…we find that monthly changes in gold prices lead to an increase in girl relative to boy neonatal mortality and that the surviving girls are shorter.” The analysis of this specific correlation is new, but the study of the dynamic isn’t. For example, here’s Amartya Sen back in 1990.

• Hating the wrong tech people for the right reasons
  Jon Evans - TechCrunch
  

  Clearly I am biased here, but Evans makes good arguments. It is easy to blame big tech for problems. He doubled down with this argument in a different direction [over here]. Tech has caused negative changes, but let’s not pretend that Tech is guilty of everything.

• I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to learn to love the blockchain
  Jon Evans - TechCrunch
  

  If you’re a blockchain skeptic, this might change that.

• The million-dollar brownstone that no one owned
  Cole Hawes Louison - The Outline
  

  Private property, ownership, and the many rights and regulations that surround them are in fact pretty complex. Who owns the space in which you’re in right now? It might not be that simple.

• The Tyranny of the U.S. Dollar
  Peter Coy - Bloomberg
  

  Having the whole world virtually on a single currency, owned by a single country, and serving that country’s interests is an anomaly, and other states seem to be catching on to the fact that they can do something about it.

• The Crisis Was in the System
  Matt Levine - Bloomberg View
  

  Humans build complex systems, and those systems lead to unintended consequences.

• What Follows the End of History? Identity Politics
  Evan Goldstein, interviewing Francis Fukuyama - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  

  I have never read any Fukuyama, but his end of history hypothesis feels very wrong these days.

• The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth
  Conrad Bastable
  

  A somewhat depressing view of the rat race, but seems like sound analysis. Bastable discusses how we’ve built a system in which people are forced to save for basic needs and services like housing, education, and healthcare, with no real way of ever accumulating enough money to make their expected standard of living achievable. As my friend Stephen mentioned on Twitter, we have to “acknowledge the common factor among the sectors most subject to cost disease: a predominance of government subsidy and regulation.” because “subsidy of demand is captured by suppliers via increased prices.” We need to find ways to tie prices and costs back together.

• How the Elderly Lose Their Rights
  Rachel Aviv - The New Yorker
  

  On one of my article club meetings with my friends a couple of months ago, the article was this ridiculous New Yorker piece about the rights of the elderly. We had a great discussion. There are interesting questions about state power, family dynamics, corruption, and much more. The state puts rules in place meant to protect its citizens, so what happens when people with bad intentions ride on those rules to take away the rights of others? An important question these days.

• It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs
  Louis Hyman - The New York Times
  

  Our current policies around labor don’t match the new reality we live in, and neither stopping the “the gig economy,” nor shoehorning it in the old paradigm will do. “…technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. […] Uber is a symptom, not a cause.” We can change the status-quo.

• The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter
  Jianan Qian - The New York Times
  

  As someone who lives far away from his family this was a tough read. As someone whose parents (both of them!) have gotten sick while I’ve been away this was a really tough read. This is an empathy building piece, but also a vignette into China and the life of those immigrants who live in the boundary space between two worlds.

• India Pushes Back Against Tech 'Colonization' by Internet Giants
  Vindu Goel - The New York Times
  

  We’re headed into a world of protectionism. It is scary to think what won’t exist because of it. "…officials admire Beijing’s tight control over citizens’ data and how it has nurtured homegrown internet giants like Alibaba and Baidu by limiting foreign competition." If India goes down this path, and closes itself off to western companies like China has, the market dynamics of working on new products change completely. When your addressable market goes from being the world to excluding the two economies that are forecasted to be the largest in a few years theres way less incentives to build new things. That’s bad.

• Towards The Post-Liberal Synthesis
  Palladium Magazine
  

  The effort by the people behind Palladium is laudable. They are trying to answer the question of what comes after liberalism, and are publishing this magazine to that end. I, too, am convinced that the current world order is not sustainable, and would love to see it be replaced with a less broken version of itself, based on liberal ideas. I’ll keep an eye on their work, and I hope you do, too.

• My Parents Give Me $28,000 a Year
  E. J. Roller
  

  A privileged person suddenly notices their privilege, and tries to understand it. What’s most interesting about this piece is not the argument she tries to make for basic income, nor the commentary on the value of education, but instead its point about taxation. Taxes on gifts and inheritance are way too low, and lead to weird incentives.

• Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth?
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  

  The indicators we pick matter. The ways we measure things matter. Here, Russ makes a strong set of arguments agains the usual arguments about the standard of living in the US, and who wins from economic growth. I think the rich-get-richer dynamics in our modern economic systems are extremely strong, and this piece downplays them a little bit, but the point that Russ makes about the dynamism of the various groups is definitely something that is not talked about enough. Made me think of the random handouts experiment I had produced a while back, which I never turned into a full blog post. The longer you run that simulation, the more obvious it is that people switch from one bucket to another all the time.

• The Lonely Man with a Gun
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  

  The events from the past couple of weeks are tragic, and deeply troubling. It is on days like these that I remember that it doesn’t matter whether I think of myself as part of a group or not. The case that Russ makes here is that the problem at the root of all the gun violence in the US is not the availability of guns, but the fact that the social fabric that mediates our interactions has torn. In his own words, “One of the glorious things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone. […] And yet, one of the most horrific things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone.”

• The Ideology of Isolation
  Rebecca Solnit - Harper's Magazine
  

  A couple of weeks ago I heard Rebecca Solnit at an event at City Lights. There, she commented on how privilege isolates you. In her view, more privilege makes you more disconnected, until you live in a world of one person. Just you. I found it insightful. She said it in the context of the current leaders in the US, but it made me think of the scenes about Stalin in In The First Circle. This essay develops that idea further. There is an interesting contradiction in conservatism, which is so tightly bound to religion and its value of religious communities, contra the individualism pushed by the modern right. Who has written on the reconciliation of these two ideas?

• What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?
  The New Republic - Cass R. Sunstein
  

  Sometimes, counterfactuals are just wishful thinking. Other times, they are tools. Sunstein’s review of Richard Evans’ Altered Pasts gives us a great lens through which to look at history. Also, the pun in this piece’s title is awesome.

• Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary
  Lydia Davis - Paris Review
  

  As part of my current Coursera class on Modernism and Postmodernism, I am currently reading Madame Bovary. Given my interest in languages and translation, I ended up doing some research of my own into which translation was worth reading, and it seemed like Lydia Davis’ was the recommended one. During my search, I found this piece by her on the process of translating it.

• Data Pipeline
  Randall Munroe - xkcd
  

  And to end on a good note, this is my daily life.

This set of photos is a mixed bag. Some of them have been sitting in my archive for almost a year, and some I took just a couple of weeks ago. They’re also a mixed bag in terms of quality, but editing is not my strong suit - I have a really hard time cutting. More...

I’m not sure how I found Magritte in the first place, but as a teenager, his Son of Man became my avatar on every online platform where I spent afternoons and evenings during the mid-aughts. I pondered endlessly on his playful compositions, full of contradictions, false premises, and recursive repetitive themes. The motifs in Magritte’s art — paintings within paintings, windows confounding what was inside with what was outside, ambiguous and impossible light sources — invite us to question the automatic assumptions we make about what is in front of our eyes, the nature of reality, and what the objects we interact with on our daily lives actually represent. Images are treacherous, etc, etc. Continue reading...

After a long time without visiting, I finally got to spend some time in Boston this past weekend with Max and Einat. We decided not to plan much, which turned out to be a great decision. More...