📚 Neat Stuff I Read Before January 2026

The plan for Manuscriptions in 2026, plus Deep dives on pen cap functionality, raccoon evolution, & sexy perfumes. Also other neat articles about science, history, technology, and literature.

You may remember that the December edition went out just before Christmas… and that neither October nor September had linksposts. I finally went back through my notes and compiled the list of stuff I read around then and really enjoyed.

My plan for 2026 is to write one of these link roundups every month. I’m also aiming to do a monthly longform review of a chonky nonfiction book, in the style of Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire by Leslie Peirce or my response to Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. With any luck, I’ll also manage a monthly deep dive on a nerdy topic, and a monthly post related to note-taking or productivity. That should give 2026 a bit more structure and regularity. I also want to expand my exercise habit to a for-real daily walk, read at least one chunky nonfiction book a month — and not necessarily the one I review, because I do have a backlog.

I’m going to start 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline in dead tree form, and read The Scythian Empire by Christopher Beckworth as an ebook; we’ll see which one I finish first but I intend to discuss 1177 BC with folks in various places during January, because I will do a better job of digitizing my notes if I do it that way — please feel free to pick up a copy and follow along!

And that brings me to my final goal for 2026: by the end of 2026, I want to have a “bench” of at least 6 finished drafts in case I get sick or end up really busy, so that I don’t miss any weeks of posting. Things are going pretty well so far — I am pretty confident that next week my review of The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester should land in your inbox, because I wrote it on the train to New York last weekend. Keep an eye out for it if you or any of your friends are into nerdy deep dives on precision engineering, and in the meantime please enjoy this curated list of neat stuff I read but didn’t have a chance to tell you about until now.

Technology

• This article about how nobody knows how large software projects work seemed pretty in line with my experiences in software-related communities in the last twenty years or so. Institutional knowledge is important!

• I stumbled across this article rounding up “all the good news from 2025” and it’s not your usual fluff piece feel-good “man saves cat” list; this is a heartening roundup of diseases we have wiped out, ways in which human lives are objectively, materially better than they’ve ever been, etc. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s just incredible how much got accomplished that didn’t fit some doomer narrative and so didn’t cross my feed before this.

• This is a really cool thing about how pen caps work.

• Here’s a deep-dive history from Brian Potter about how Bell Labs won its first Nobel Prize.

• Using data from Uber, this team was able to estimate the roughness of every road in America and precisely estimate the value people place on it, and so much more.

History

• I learned a lot about African history from this article, specifically early Nigeria and the impact of farming on local societies. I especially appreciated all the links to formal studies so I can dig more at my leisure, and it contrasts nicely with this paper about why the first European farmers vanished.

• One of the history questions I’m most intrigued by is “exactly how much did climate change impact life for people in ancient civilizations.” Modern political discourse and trendy perspectives in academia make it hard to get what feels like a straight answer, but I always try. Here’s a paper claiming that climate change is what allowed for Polynesian exploration, and another claiming that the Indus Valley civilization collapsed due to environmental changes.

• Here’s why there are such dense concentrations of cities in North Rhine-Westphalia compared to the rest of Germany.

• This comparison of Venice and Taiwan — both merchant states in a way I hadn’t really connected before — was fascinating.

• They found a huge undersea wall from 5800 BC off the coast of France!

• This “review” of Marie Antoinette by Annie Normal taught me a lot about how propaganda can really distort someone’s legacy; Antoinette was much cooler than most of us give her credit for.

• Speaking of neat powerful women, here’s a history of East African matriarchs from isaac Samuel.

• This article from Ralph Stefan Weir made me feel a lot better about thinking repainted classical statues are ugly. I knew some, but not all, of the backstory behind the “evidence based retouching” but this article has lots of contemporary art that isn’t ugly to help showcase what classical statues probably actually did look like when painted.

• Speaking of paint, here’s Beth Mathews with a neat, deep divey breakdown of why so many control rooms were seafoam green.

• I had occasion to read Bret Devereaux’s breakdown of pre-industrial “spherical cow city” layout, and it was fascinating.

Science

• This is a deep dive on the history of titanium, which is very abundant but also doesn’t naturally occur much in its pure form… along with this other investigation of what it would take to make it cheap and abundant. I still kinda think aluminum is neater, but who knows how I would feel about it if I lived 200 years from now?

• Naked mole rats are cool. Here’s what they can teach us about living longer.

• Here’s a deep dive into the impact of trash can innovations on the raccoon population of Toronto. Spoilers: raccoons figured them out.

• Here’s why big animals like elephants are unintuitively important to healthy forests.

• Did you know there are planets upon which it rains glass?

Miscellaneous

• I’ve realized that one of my favorite genre of essay is “someone completely alien to my way of thinking, but kind of awful, writing an insightful piece that demonstrates a worldview I struggle to comprehend.” The latest I shared with some friends was about a guy who is, as far as I can tell, addicted to gambling on dumb Polymarket questions. Before that it was this guy who had sex with his brother’s wife as a teenager.

• I enjoyed Gwern’s discussion of perfume as an aesthetic, artistic experience, as well as this deep dive on what makes perfume smell sexy from Sithara Ranasinghe, much more than I otherwise might have if I hadn’t already read books like The Tainted Cup (affiliate link, or my review), where the link between scent and memory is vital to the plot, or Paladin’s Grace, where the protagonist is a perfumer who hooks up with a Paladin whose god died.

• This look at how placeholder currencies can help charities operate more efficiently really helped me understand the value of even obviously “fake” “free market” monetary systems.

Media & Literature

I watched John Wick (and really enjoyed it, especially the way the Miss Perkins character and new dog at the end were handled) and Tropic Thunder (which had a mediocre script but excellent acting and costuming).

Now that I have kids, I try to listen to music that actually has something to do with my/our life instead of angry teenaged breakup songs, or at least stuff that puts me in a happy and loving mood. To that end, I also discovered two new songs that I adore: The Good Ones by Gabby Barrett and Tennesee Orange Megan Moroney.

That said, here’s some commentary about media and literature from other people:

• Here’s a delightful retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight stories from Arthurian legend, with lots of historical context from Aurochs to make it accessible.

• This old movie review from Virginia Weaver starts off with “Christmas in Connecticut (1945) stars the greatest actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck, as Elizabeth Lane, a tradwife influencer who’s faked the whole trad thing — and the wife thing, too. It’s the best movie about 2025” and continues being fascinating.

• The notes for the Wizard of Oz are really cool, especially the part where he framed the (stub of the) pencil he wrote it with.

• Weird Al Yankovic (and Kuiper) can teach us a lot about copyright law; this is a great article about the one time he probably went a bit too far with a not quite parody.

• This is a fun chart showcasing the most “life-changing” books. The data is derived from Amazon reviews.