What I've been reading and watching this month.
Link Love
The Federalist Reader is recreating all eighty-five Federalist Papers as a clean, readable web newspaper edition. You can even subscribe to have them delivered on their original publication schedule.
The rest of this month's links are a rabbit-hole coming out of one piece: Amanda Shendruk's essay on why our brains fail at understanding large numbers. Her claim is that our numbness to big values (a bias called scope insensitivity) flattens our response to the biggest problems we have, like genocide death tolls and billionaire fortunes. She rounds up some of the best tools for building that intuition, and I fell down the whole rabbit hole.
- You can watch Elon Musk's net worth climb in real time.
- The Washington Post translates ultra-wealthy spending into your own budget (from 2020, still lands), and Mona Chalabi illustrated Jeff Bezos's fortune for the New York Times in cake slices.
- FlowingData compresses the history of Earth into a 24-hour clock — humans show up seconds before midnight.
- And Wealth, Shown to Scale makes you scroll, and scroll, and scroll through billionaire wealth at ten pixels per $5 million.
Don't skip the companion essay dismantling the "paper billionaire" argument, that claims a billionaire’s money can’t be taxed or spent because it's all tied up in stocks. (It can be. It could end malaria.)
One more from Shendruk while you're there: America isn't exceptional — it's the exception, on how the US shows up in international data as the outlier…but, like, in the bad ways. We’re number one…
Shows and Books and Movies
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 is out. The first episode was a lot of fun—an interesting moral dilemma plus dinosaurs. Peak Star Trek.
The new Aang: The Last Airbender movie. Gorgeous animation, and absolutely wonderful to be back in that world. The story was meh: not enough of the Gaang together, and it plays like a speed run of Korra and all her moral dilemmas. But it is kinda like Aang finally got his airbending chapter.
The Odyssey. I’ve seen it twice now. I really, really like it. I wrote a full review: "Strangers and Beggars Are from Zeus." Emily Wilson's criticisms make it seem like she’s unsure what film adaptations are for. I should write about that.
The pro-shot of Hadestown. Again, so incredibly good. Peak performance after peak performance. The music has been stuck in my head for weeks.
Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm on book two. Super fun series, and the perfect running audiobook—a lot of it is skimmable, which is what you want mid-run.
