🎂 It's My Birthday, Please Comment!

An Open Thread in the tradition of Ask A Manager, Astral Codex Ten, Naval Gazing, & Many More

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be in Salt Lake City, Utah for Brandon Sanderson’s Dragonsteel Nexus convention. If anyone is in the area or is planning to attend, please reach out — I’d love to grab a cup of tea and chat if we can make the timing work :)

Also, Gabriel is a PhD researcher at UCL’s Interaction Centre studying large-language models (LLMs) as a form of distributed cognition¹. He’s looking for a diverse group of participants to share how they’ve overcome limitations in LLMs to augment their workflows. If you’re interested (even if you just want to rant about AI), please fill out this very brief form.

A Few Gentle Requests

Just like last year, I’m asking: if you have any recommendations for fluffy fiction that is generally well-written, involves grown-ups with grown-up problems, reasonably fulfilling lives, relatively inspirational reading experience and lots of small, simple wins, please share. I do not want to get slapped in the face with a bitter rant about how unpleasant life is on page six; I know many authors are having tough times these days, but I am not in a stage where diatribes about unfairness are good for my mental health. The only way out is through; I don’t want to wallow in all the ways in which intolerant bureaucrats are evil.

Also, if you have a friend who might enjoy one of the articles I wrote this year, can you do me a favor and pass it along to them? They’re all free², I like to think they’re reasonably interesting, and it would mean a lot to me during this birthday and holiday season.

There’s the gratifyingly popular write-up about how I do analog note-taking and how I’ve managed to incorporate ink sketches into my notebook without feeling self-conscious, the lengthy review of a Civilizations of Africa textbook intended for college students, my thoughts on why it’s good to read old books, a fun little deep dive on sumptuary laws, some thoughts on how writing speculative fiction helps me create a mental model of complex concepts, a study of catastrophes caused by agricultural mismanagement, and a review of Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff — which was probably the most impactful book I read this year in terms of changing how I think. The full archive is at the website.

I’m also pretty excited that my article about the relationship between crises and character has spawned ✨discourse✨ — here’s Victoria Stanham reflecting on the article in the context of fiction writing, and Orion Anderson gently pushing back against both of us with a defense of crisis as the foundation of character — if you’re curious, do be sure to check out my comments in reply to his post!

Last thing: thank you

It is sometimes difficult to prioritize writing, but my essays mean a lot to me. Having a regular writing habit in which I write ~weekly articles is very rewarding. But as with physical exercise, it can be hard for me to prioritize unless other people care. Every comment, every kind email, every ping on social media, every ‘heart’ on every post, and yes every dollar y’all share with me means the world. I’m deeply thankful for each of the thousands of folks who read this newsletter on a regular basis; I think of you often, especially the lovely folks who take the time to correspond regularly. I hope you all enjoy the wham-bam holiday season that is December(ish), and have many wonderful conversions in the coming weeks.

I also really hope you post something in the comments — anything, really. Are you looking for a job? Do you have a thought you wish I’d write about? Do you want to connect with like-minded folks about nerdy history or knowledge management or airports you hate? I want to hear from you!

1. For my favorite story about distributed cognition, check out Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War series, which I reviewed back in May — and yes, that’s an affiliate link. Bees represents a contrast to more centralized AIs in the setting, embodying a decentralized, many-bodied intelligence that can coordinate over a wide area and is treated as an outlawed or highly controlled technology. Bees (and the other distributed intelligences in the series) explores what it means for cognition and agency to be distributed rather than located in a single brain or box: identity persists even as individual bees die, split off, or operate on different worlds. Later works in the series foreground Bees and related offshoots on Mars and Earth, digging into questions about cooperation, swarm decision‑making, and whether such distributed beings can be trusted or governed by human institutions.

2. I do paywall articles older than 3 years, but all of the ones from 2025 should be public. If you’re interested in my paywalled articles, here’s a coupon, since it’s my birthday :)