Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. Ulkar on Kodaly and the cello.
2. “Lowbrow fiction is good sex and highbrow fiction is bad sex.”
3. The economics of Duke University.
4. Beginner’s Guide to the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
5. Andrew Batson on music of the year for him.
6. Model this (claim about Freemasonry and the British police).
7. Zhengdong Wang year end letter on AI.
8. I do not think these particular estimates are reliable, nonetheless murder rates would be much higher if not for medical advances.
What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll. Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness. Here goes:
Cinema
Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Yi Yi, Artificial Intelligence, Her, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks. Incendies anyone?
Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):
Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps. Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute. As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization. So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.
Fiction
Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem. The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism. The Savage Detectives. Sonia and Sunny maybe?
Visual Arts
Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober. Late Hockney and Richter works. The best of Kara Walker. The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.
Jazz
There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity. One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators. Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side. Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald? I don’t think so.
Popular music (also a bad term)
The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. How about Sunn O)))? No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?
Television
The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Assorted
Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen. At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt. There is games and gaming. People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The new wing at MOMA. Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor. (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.) I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century. The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4. They are indeed things of beauty.
Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me. We are hardly a culture in decline.
I podcast again with Kevin Gentry
Monday assorted links
1. Medical breakthroughs from 2025.
2. 52 things Kent Hendricks learned in 2025.
3. Séb Krier.
4. Nusantara (NYT). A good piece, good photos.
5. What is the difference between cheap vs. expensive jeans?
Top Posts of 2025
Here are the top MR posts of 2025 as measured by page views. Number one post goes to Tyler:
An excellent post that pairs well with another Tyler post, also in the top ten, A median voter theory of right-wing populism which has the punchline:
The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters.
Number two was also a Tyler post. Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow, an excellent accounting of AI economic and institutional bottlenecks. This pairs well with another top-ten post in which Tyler announces that AGI is already here. Both posts are correct. An interesting conundrum.
Third and fourth are two of my posts:
3. UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills
4. One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000
Next is Tyler’s rundown of non-fiction books. Well worth re-reading.
5. Best non-fiction books of 2025 with one late addition.
Next I was pleased to see my post in which I explain some standard economics but in a deeper, more fundamental way than is usually done: One of my favorite posts of the year:
Why Do Domestic Prices Rise With Tariffs?
Zephyr Teachout’s op-ed wasn’t fun to read but I admit I did have some fun writing a response
Here’s another issue which makes me mad. The destruction of boarding houses, a perfectly reasonable housing form that reduces homelessness. Or to put it more simply, why is sharing a house illegal? Outrageous.
The War on Roommates: Why Is Sharing a House Illegal?
I am all for American greatness but the approach of the Trump administration is often backwards. I pointed out the big differences between the Sputnik moment and what I called the DeepSeek Moment in two posts.
The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment: Why the Difference? and The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers.
I was pleased that David Brooks picked up on my framing in the NYTimes.
Finally my post The Library Burned Slowly sparked a brief spat with Chris Rufo. Rufo’s ability to turn the tools of the left on them is impressive but I haven’t changed my mind that “Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization.”
What were your favorite posts of the year, either at MR or elsewhere?
J. M. W. Turner, financial arbitrageur
Abstract. J. M. W. Turner is famous for his achievements in graphic arts. What is not known is that he engaged in some pioneering market arbitrage, a profitable and risk-free swapping of British government securities. His activities lead to interesting insights into British markets of the 19th century. Financial innovation frequently created profitable arbitrage opportunities. However, among regular investors it seems that it was mostly mavericks like Turner who took advantage of them. Apparently there were strong cultural factors that inhibited most people from imitating him, which allowed obvious pricing anomalies to persist for extended periods.
That is from a recent paper by Andrew Odlyzko. Via Colin.
The Inflation Attention Threshold
From Oliver Pfäuti:
The recent inflation surge brought inflation back on people’s minds. I quantify when and how much attention to inflation changes and derive the macroeconomic implications of these attention changes. I estimate an attention threshold at an inflation rate of 4%, that attention doubles when inflation exceeds this threshold, and that supply shocks have stronger and more persistent effects on inflation in times of high attention. Developing a model featuring the attention threshold, I show that the observed attention changes offer a joint explanation for the recent inflation surge, its interplay with inflation expectations, and the long last mile of disinflation.
Here is the paper.
Canada fact of the day
Since 2015, Canada has tripled its Indigenous spending – paying more than on national defense. Over those same years, Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic collapse in health and well-being: on average almost a full decade of lost life expectancy.
That is from David Frum.
Sunday assorted links
2. Ryan Briggs: “Prediction: in the short-to-medium term LLMs will make the reputation of the researcher matter more for whether or not we view results as credible because it will become too hard to read everything and people will want shortcuts for filtering. Again, this hits juniors hardest.”
3. Brian Greene and Ed Witten discuss string theory.
4. Short video of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Go, go, go!
5. Why Israel recognized Somaliland? Many things going on, risk of war in East Africa is now heightened, here is some speculation. Big story for 2026?
6. Gary Graffman, RIP (NYT).
More Saturday assorted links
1. Turning a pdf into a short class.
2. Those mid-Atlantics love to fly to Tokyo. Mexico City not good enough for you?
3. Major AI researchers are rapidly turning more bullish for instance here is Roon. And here is Andrej.
4. The boom in Mexican trade (WSJ).
5. Thailand says its bombings in Cambodia are targeting the scam industry (NYT). Here is some commentary, the whole matter is deeply weird. Consider this a new take on Clausewitz!
Saturday assorted links
1. Some observations on immigration and wage effects. The spread of immigrants to incipient high-wage areas may be one rise why the geographic mobility of resident Americans has gone down.
2. No good explanation for why more boys than girls are born after wars.
3. Slides on ticket resale, by Eric Budish.
4. Steven Durlauf recommends five 2025 books in economics.
5. The ongoing rise of YouTube (FT). “The creator economy advertising market is expected to reach $37bn this year, up 26 per cent from a year ago, according to the estimates by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The group expects the market to rise another 18 per cent in 2026.”
Friday assorted links
1. David Brooks offers some Sidney awards, including to Works in Progress (NYT).
2. If you are the Lakers, of course you should have traded for the new superstar, namely Luka. But by now it is clear the trade actually will not work out so well, and Dallas is better off with Cooper Flagg.
3. “The threat to German auto producers isn’t from Chinese cars flooding Germany. It’s from Chinese cars flooding to emerging markets (red), where they’re killing the market for German cars. That’s not something EU tariffs on China are going to be able to fix.” Link here.
5. The brother Megan McArdle lost.
6. “Our Archivara Math Research Agent (in alpha) just became the first AI system to fully solve an Erdős problem on its own (zero human input or literature online).” Link here.
Cayman (U.S.) fact of the day
Over the past four years, hedge funds have doubled their footprint in the U.S. debt market, making the Cayman Islands — where many hedge funds are officially based — the place where the most U.S. debt outside the United States is held, according to the Fed. Typically, people flock to Treasuries for safety in times of crisis. Yet, driven in large part by hedge fund activity, the Treasury market went through unusual turbulence during recent shocks, including the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April 2025.
And this:
By the early 2010s, these foreign governments made up over 40 percent of Treasury holdings, excluding those the Federal Reserve held. That was up from just over 10 percent in the mid-1990s…Foreign governments now make up less than 15 percent of the overall Treasury market.
Christmas assorted links
2. India is prepping for major economic reforms (FT).
3. One view on why computers cannot be conscious.
4. “America’s six largest banks added $600bn in market value in 2025, spurred on by the Trump administration’s push to deregulate the industry and a revival in investment banking.” (FT) This is one reason why gdp growth has been robust. Whatever you think of bank regulation more generally, in 2025 we needed less of it, not more.
5. Inmates could escape jail on drones (Times of London).
6. What do soccer tickets cost in New Jersey?
7. The origins of European thought on new discoveries.
8. Titanic, Hagen, 33-minute Guatemalan/Mexican musical avant-garde creation. Here is some background (NYT). I am growing increasingly bullish on Latin American and also Spanish-language music. I will be following it more closely in 2026.
Merry Christmas
