Good Reads · No. 1

20–26 July 2026 · 12 pieces

The first issue — 12 pieces spanning science, society, philosophy, history, and more.

  1. One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger.

    science·Quanta Magazine·49 min read
  2. When her son, Hugo, failed to answer his phone on the morning of 12 July 2005, Isabel Miranda de Wallace did not waste a moment.

    society·The Guardian·35 min read
  3. Glen Weyl founded and helps lead Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, the RadicalxChange Foundation, the Faith, Family and Technology Network and the Plurality Institute.

    philosophy·Noema·24 min read
  4. Rust and Boll (asteriskmag.com)

    Dylan Matthews Anthropic should learn from those cotton-picking socialists. The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible.

    science·Asterisk·20 min read
  5. Hong Wang is now just the third woman to win a Fields Medal.

    science·Quanta Magazine·17 min read
  6. In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze.

    society·The Guardian·27 min read
  7. The United States risks the fate of Bourbon France, whose strategic brilliance in the American War of Independence masked a contradictory grand strategy that led to ruin.

    history·Engelsberg Ideas·26 min read
  8. Two hundred and fifty years after the first volume of the Decline and Fall, Edward Gibbon's diagnosis of why Rome collapsed is a warning to our own age.

    history·Engelsberg Ideas·13 min read
  9. In the spring, I joined a group of fellow Indian journalists in Beijing for an invite-only talk with Chinese think tankers and academics in the city’s glitzy central business district.

    philosophy·Noema·11 min read
  10. Carl Jung on Creativity (themarginalian.org)

    The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple…

    life·The Marginalian·10 min read
  11. I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them.

    tech·Dan Luu·28 min read
  12. Pedantry is as old as the history of learning itself, but it is not a stable concept.

    art·The Public Domain Review·14 min read