Nathanael Yellis

There's no better travel accessory than a book: works anywhere, requires no accessories, and rivets the mind. And, while I'll countenance alternate points of view, the size of mass market "pocket" paperbacks is the best form of book. They are four and a quarter by seven inches, fit easily in your coat or blue jeans pocket, and hold your attention for hours. I constructed the shelves of my office bookcase to be just over fourteen inches tall and about ten inches deep to ensure I could quadruple stack pocket paperbacks: two rows high, two rows deep. When I prepare for my flight on Sunday, I'll go to those stacks for a few new (to me) volumes and maybe one old one, for comfort. Everything else will be in my checked bag.

If you ask the wrong kind of person, then you'll hear that this winter has been bad. Real bad, according to them. You see, up here in New England, snow has fallen, multiple times, in such great quantities as to be measured by the foot, and it has stuck. On the North Shore, we haven't seen our gray-brown yards in a month.

It's February, 2026, and us Ice Coasters are having a ridiculous winter. The coastal snow fell and fell again and we had weeks of cold, keeping our powder fresh and plentiful. Among the long-dreamt lines I've skied now is, at the end of Mountain Road in York, Maine, Mt. Agamenticus.

On the train home the other night, I listened to yet another interview with Dario Amodei, the thinking person's AI hype man. At the very beginning of the interview, he gave a little background on himself (neatly omitting stints at Baidu and Google and OpenAI) as a biophysics degree-holder who'd previously done research in microbiology. I thought more about this as he described the monitoring his company does of its LLMs by talking about seeing their "neurons lighting up" in their "brains." It's not the worst analogy, but it illuminates a bit more about the observer (biology guy) than the observed (computer programs).

Today's reading gives you two troubling trends. The first piece below argues, fairly compellingly, that we're all becoming the same. The second wonders if the human species might've numerically already peaked. Both authors, one from data and the other from taste, are not-so-subtly telling us that what's happening isn't good. Both critiques rely on an unfavorable comparison the present has with the past.

I spent the time that I normally use to write this email reading a book. Sometimes good literature grabs you and tells you to ignore your plans and keep reading. Normally I steer clear of genre fiction, but when two people told me I had missed out by not reading Dune, I put it on the shelf. Picking it up this week proved to be the undoing of my train podcasts, my writing time, and my "early to bed" aspirations.

They say that "you make your own luck." But the people who say that typically are showing you their winning lottery ticket or just after their story about how they hit it off with a guy in the elevator who ended up being the interviewer for their first job. Or maybe those are the sour grapes from beginning my career during the financial crisis. While luck has something to do with it, there's wisdom in preparing for a big break or, to put it in nerdy terms, in increasing the surface area for your luck. When it comes to career, a successful friend of mine gave me this formula: doing good work, networking, and Fortuna.

I read and relate positively to a surprising proportion of Buddhist and specifically Zen literature. It's surprising because I practice (poorly) another of the world's great religions. I'm drawn in by the way in which the wise people from Zen Buddhism decisively sweep away the things that do not matter and incisively describe the things we all experience but don't often consider. As a wisdom tradition, they've got something to say. Their wisdom cuts neatly against our culture's endless affirmation of everything we think, feel, and say—they tell us to quiet the mind, notice and ignore our feelings, and, to be blunt, to stop. In an accelerating and frenetic pace of activities and considerations, the Zen title says, "don't just do something, sit there." Instead of telling us that our reactions are physical and important, the Buddha tells us our needs and wants hold us captive.