Books

• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary — Reading this on a Kindle did my head in, because seeing what other people have highlighted in this book in particular isn’t great ✅
• Rosamund & Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility

Songs

• The Menzingers, “Everything I Ever Saw”
• Kim Petras, “Brutalist”
• Fiona Apple, “Horns of a Bull”

Sundries

• Henry Farrell, “The Political Economy of Billionaire Derangement”
• Ali Riza Taşkale, “The Looting of Science Fiction”
• Noam Segal and Lenny Rachitsky, “How Tech Workers Are Feeling in 2026”

Books

• Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer ✅
• Zadie Smith, The Fraud ✅
• Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

Songs

• Phoebe Bridgers, “Lost Boys”
• Tim Barry, “W.W. Pool”
• KRS-ONE, “What Is the Message?”

Sundries

• Tom MacWright, “Accidental Anonymity”
• Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and Benjamin Recht, “Reify This”
• Nathan K. Hensley & Anna Gibson, “Book Talk: A Conversation about Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse”

Books

• Arthur Miller, The Crucible (Prep for seeing John Proctor Is The Villain) ✅
• Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword ✅
• Robin Sloan, Moonbound

Songs

• Wednesday, “Pick Up That Knife”
• Blood Orange, “Mind Loaded”
• Tyler, the Creator, “Stop Playing With Me”

Sundries

• How Anthropic Teams Use Claude Code
• Six Principles for Production AI Agents
• Just Put a Human in the Loop? Investigating LLM-Assisted Annotation for Subjective Tasks

Books

• Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur
• Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
• Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Songs

• Cleo Reed, “Always the Horse, Never the Jockey”
• Buffalo Nichols, “Moses”
• Jim Legxacy, “‘06 wayne rooney”

Sundries

• “Back to the Future: Evaluating AI Agents on Predicting Future Events”
• “Gaslight-driven Development”
• Special issue of Philosophy and Digitality on “LLMs and The Patterns of Human Language Use”

Today Anthropic announced Claude for Education, which introduces “Learning Mode” (which, in Projects, tends to offer guidance rather than answers, has some common templates, and a few other tricks). It also includes whole-campus access to Claude.ai.