📚 Neat Stuff I Read in April 2026

On "doing your own research" in the AI age, messy economics in fiction, & what funerals do to African households. Also: the airline wars, vending-machine money laundering, & breakthrus in health sci.

April was a busy month, y’all. I read a ton (Substack says this email may get truncated because of the length, sorry!), celebrated Easter with the fam, sent my son to my parents’ for a week and went to the movies with my husband for the first time in ages, resigned my (beloved!) job at Readwise due to health reasons I won’t get too deep into here, read a ton (including books, which may have affiliate links below), and started arranging weekly lunches with acquaintances, including a guy I’ve barely seen since high school and a lady from church whose kids are about the same age as mine.

Productivity

• Brian Schrader wrote about his system for taking better notes by hand, which combines digital bookmarking tools with paper notebooks. He writes only on right-hand pages in pen, leaving the left side for penciled follow-up thoughts, and maintains separate notebooks by topic. It’s a nice practical walkthrough for anyone who’s tried to go back to handwriting but struggled with the lack of space for later editing.

• I liked Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article about how presenteeism is a hidden productivity killer, covering how the pressure to look busy persists even in remote work. She breaks presentees into four types based on health and performance, and traces the triggers back to things like workaholism, job insecurity, and performance-based self-esteem.

• Cedric Chin had a great piece about how experts sensemake, which covers the Data-Frame Theory developed from US military research. The core idea is that experts and novices use the same cognitive process — the difference is that experts have richer mental models, so they build better frames faster and recover quicker when their initial read is wrong. It’s a practical piece if you’re interested in how to actually get better at reading ambiguous situations rather than just telling yourself to “be more open-minded.”

AI

• Adam Mastroianni claims that AI is an infinite midwit, or rather that it’s great at problems with clear right answers but is fundamentally unable to do the squishy, subjective work that makes creative output worth reading. Personally, I find AI research aggregation really helpful and AI writing tics so annoying that it’s messing up my ability to read old books that sprinkle similar phrases in, personally.

• Gregor Ojstersek wrote a walkthrough on using OpenClaw as an engineering leader, and says that hallucinations are the main problem and you need strong technical judgment to tell when the tool is confidently wrong. Just like calculators can’t substitute for developing good “math sense” (so you can identify a flub when you input 4+4 and get 10 because you hit 6 instead...), AI is not a substitute for developing domain knowledge. It’s still helpful tho.

• Kuiper’s Just do the reading similarly points out that summaries, explainers, and lectures can help, but at some point the only way to know what a book or paper says is to sit down with the thing itself.

• Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS breaks research into two modes — verification (checking a specific claim) and exploration (building understanding from scratch) — in a deep dive on what “do your own research” actually means and what its history is now “so loaded that hearing it now tends to shut conversations down rather than open them up.”

• Taylor Pearson wrote As We May Work, about what non-technical knowledge workers (like me!) need to understand about the next wave of AI.

• Andrew McAfee’s This Week in Putting AI to Work is another practical survey of how people are actually using AI instead of arguing about it in the abstract.

• This guy tried to get LLMs to predict how his coffee experiments would turn out and they did... not do so great. BTW I also enjoyed this ‘brief’ history of instant coffee.

• The Observer profiled the Catholic priest who helped write Anthropic’s AI ethics code. I have a soft spot for rationalist-adjacent Catholics and ethicists actually being useful, so it was a fun read.

• Jay Fowler’s “two AIs in a trench coat” reviewed Die With Zero, and it’s interesting not just because it’s a early retirement adjacent book that people seem to like, but because it uses AI to turn “it could have been a blog post” into longform book review blog posts in the style of Jane Psmith, Scott Alexander, and, well, me.

Media

• On that note, the ever-delightful Jane Psmith reviewed Thomas Asbridge’s The Greatest Knight, about William Marshal and the messy business of surviving five English kings. Seriously I want to be just like her when I grow up (ignore the fact that we’re roughly the same age).

• Nathan Goldwag wrote a pretty compelling argument that the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s constitutional monarchy is structurally closer to an aristocratic oligarchy and doesn’t really make sense throughout the course of the series. It’s a thought-provoking piece if you like thinking about how fictional worldbuilding holds up under political science scrutiny and like using fiction to think about economics. I learned most of what I know about the French Revolution and Napoleanic Wars from the Honor Harrington series so I found it really helpful for mapping that onto reality.

• I loved the discussion over on Big iff True’s magic train theory of economics. It’s also about economics in the context of fiction, this time the movie Snowpiercer, in which “the economy is almost literally a black box—a magic, static engine, out of sight and mind. In reality, the essence of economic prosperity is cooperation. Human flourishing depends on us working together: sharing ideas, dovetailing labor, coordinating on language and technology, reallocating resources, refraining from violence.” It was a very insightful critique from Daniel Muñoz but the comments had some interesting pushback on the thesis.

• I saw Project Hail Mary with my husband and liked it a lot. I liked the book a little better because we get more of Ryland’s internal problem-solving, but the physical humor only works on screen, so I think the two versions complement each other nicely. Aaron M. Renn wrote about how the movie handles positive masculinity, and Orson Scott Card said he thinks science fiction is in good hands because of this movie.

• Every so often I am reminded that I live in an extremely weird reading bubble. Pew found that Americans still prefer print books over digital or audio versions, and very few are in book clubs.

• For May in my book club, we are reading Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works. He also wrote How Asia Works, but the book about Africa was published this year after like ten years of researching in Africa because fans of his Asia book kept asking about how his theories apply to Africa. It seems reasonably even-handed so far, and fits neatly with the development and institutions threads running through a lot of the stuff I read last month.

• In April, we read Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr. It was extremely well-written, his predictions hold up, and I learned a ton about the history of airlines in America. It was particularly timely given the whole “Who Killed Spirit Airlines” discourse; Petzinger wrote this back in 2010 but there were several merger stories and several stories about past generations of budget airlines trying to compete. It also had a really detailed look into hub economics, legislative and judicial impacts on airlines, and how the airlines drove a lot of early computer development. The bits about Southwest Airlines were my favorite, because Herb Kelleher was a hell of a guy and Petzinger handled the biographical aspects really well. Seriously great book, highly recommended.

• I also read the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter. I don’t really have much to add to the discourse that Scott Alexander didn’t say back in 2014, but I’m glad I read it and my most common reaction to the book was “ok if you think thing A in context B, why not apply it in context C…?” It didn’t really move the needle on my decision to leave my job, but it came up a lot in discussion and I felt sort of obligated to actually read it myself.

• Evan Þ’s short reviews for April 2026 covered Peasants into Frenchmen, Children of the Night, A Wrinkle in Time, and Frankenstein. I still have not gotten to Peasants into Frenchmen (although I own it), but enough people I trust have found it useful that I still feel comfortable recommending it via affiliate link. Evan says “I’m not going to recommend [Frankenstein] for a modern audience for more than historical interest” but I disagree... I read Frankenstein back in early college, mostly because one of my neighbors needed help writing a book review of it or he was going to fail to graduate high school, and I found it a lot more readable than most of the stuff I’d been assigned. It’s a hell of a lot better than Dickens, imo!

History

• Bret Devereaux wrote about reconstructing the Roman pectoral, arguing that the standard reconstruction of the bronze chest plate described by Polybius is probably wrong — it was likely a complex seven-part harness rather than a simple square plate. One of my favorite niche historians, Sean Manning, followed up with a related piece on whether Roman-era metalworkers had trip hammers and rolling mills to produce that kind of armor at scale. Together they’re a nice window into how much we still don’t know about the practicalities of ancient military equipment.

• Doga Ozturk of Ottoman Encounters pushed back on the Ottoman decline narrative, arguing that the familiar rise-golden-age-decline-collapse arc cherry-picks evidence.

• r/AskHistorians had a deep dive on twentieth-century vending machines that touches on quite a lot of organized crime mechanics, particularly how vending machines, jukeboxes, pinball machines, coin-operated laundromats and the like allowed for money laundering. Fans of Matt Levine and Patrick McKenzie might enjoy this one.

• Evan Þ also wrote a great history of how West Virginia came to be, which gets into interesting Civil War era history and legal theory I did not know.

• Archaeologists found a copy of Homer’s Iliad inside the stomach of an ancient Egyptian mummy, which is a good reminder that ancient texts survive for weird reasons and we really only have the tip of the iceberg of what they actually produced.

• David Friedman wrote about how China went capitalist, and looked at post-Mao reforms and the way capitalism can help countries climb out of poverty. It pairs neatly with the themes I am seeing in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works and How Africa Works (affiliate links).

• Eric McKee is a Catholic economist (and also my friend). My favorite pieces this month were about whether the Roberts Court is more info protecting free speech than its predecessors, and an explanation of Lentan fasting. It’s always nice to see other people rotating through their interests instead of nicheing down and hyperspecializing forever, particularly people with PhDs :P

Sociology

• Derek Thompson asked whether cost disease is one reason America has become more socially isolated. I don’t know if I buy the whole causal chain, but the core idea is plausible: if every service-heavy activity gets more expensive because the workers would otherwise go into a different field, the places where people used to spend time together get harder to afford.

• On the flip side, David Oks wrote about how funerals keep Africa poor, arguing that lavish funeral spending is a major driver of household poverty across the continent. Social pressure to match the deceased’s perceived status drives people to borrow at 30%+ monthly interest rather than hold a modest service. It’s a useful piece if you care about how cultural norms can trap people economically in ways that are hard to legislate around. This look at how strong family ties can be bad for society and development Tibor Rutar is a direct response to Oks’ piece, with lots of great graphs.

• On similar note, Martin Sustrik wrote about suicide by culture, looking at how 19th-century Protestants (but not Catholics) in parts of Slovakia (Novohrad, Hont, Malohont, Gemer) adopted a single-child cultural norm to avoid splitting family property. It’s an eerie echo of modern fertility debates and a genuinely fascinating deep dive.

• Here’s a paper on public-goods games that found that punishment can improve welfare under the right conditions. I’m not gonna get deep into the weeds on politics and parenting here, but I found it thought-provoking and highly relevant to, well, politics and parenting and education.

• It’s kinda weird to think of it this way but... this paper on the population structure of the Amish looks at how a rapidly growing ethnic religion maintains distinct population patterns in North America.

Science

• There’s an eight-year “civil war” raging among the Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda’s Kibale National Park, where a once close-knit community has ended up killing a bunch of infants. The Hacker News thread has much more background on what might have kicked it off, but it was a reminder that ants and humans are not the only animals to wage war.

• Rhishi Pethe had a nice deep dive on North American mushrooms, digging into why U.S. mushroom production has declined while Canadian production has grown and much of that production gets exported south. The answer has to do with labor pipeline rules and quirks of how mushrooms are a year-round crop.

• Scott Travers wrote about why about 10% of humans (like my son!) are left-handed. Basically,shared handedness makes social learning, tool use, and coordination easier, but left-handedness persists because rarity can be an advantage in certain competitive situations (think baseball or fencing).

• Jul Quanouai wrote a super interesting and useful deep dive on Tylenol vs. ibuprofen, how they work, and when you should use which. I was always a little nervous about the “Tylenol overdoses can wreck your liver” thing so I found it really useful.

• Turns out The ancestors of wild wheat, barley, and rye were much less widespread in the Middle East 12,000 years ago than scholars had assumed.

• I don’t drink caffeine anymore, but I know a lot of people who do, and this piece on how the effects of caffeine last longer than the usual five-hour-half-life folk model suggests was interesting even if not directly relevant to me.

• PSA: children who say hand dryers hurt their ears are correct. My oldest hated hair dryers and my youngest hates traffic, and honestly these are reasonable things to hate given how their little ears work.

• Really exciting science is still happening: human trials have begun for a drug that could let adults regrow teeth, and there’s gene therapy trial where one injection restored hearing in weeks. I am trying not to overstate early biomedical work, but teeth and hearing are both pretty cheerful categories of progress.

• On the more “crap!” side, apparently a marine animal virus may be impacting human eyes now.

Infrastructure

• This utterly crazy story about how GoDaddy gave a longstanding major business domain to someone not involved with IT for the domain... without any documentation is definitely enough to make sure I never use GoDaddy as internet infra again...

• Basecamp wrote about leaving the cloud. I don’t know if this becomes a broad trend, but between AI leverage, cloud bills, GitHub outages, and people getting jumpy about hosted developer infrastructure, I would not be surprised if more teams start asking which parts of their stack actually need to be rented.

• While I’m dunking on Github, Awesome Agents investigated GitHub’s fake star economy. The open internet is becoming a depressing place, y’all. Oobah Butler’s story about how made his shed the top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor is funny, but it is also one more case study in reputation systems and social proof not working quite right at modern scale.

• Unforuntately I can’t get away from GitHub right now, but the April incident involving commits apparently reverting earlier merge commits in some cases was a timely reminder that sync and version control are not the same thing as backups. Have you tested your backups lately?

• Speaking of internet infra and best practices... an Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan thing. It is honestly a little amazing this took as long as it did. Plugins are vetted when they are added, not continuously blessed forever, so be careful out there.

• This deep dive into the secret behind Japan’s railways has some great graphs and charts. Among other things, Benedict Springbett touches on land use, scheduling, maintenance, labor practices, and institutional competence. I took the train to NYC back around New Year’s and it was... fine. A lot more rattly than when I took trains in Japan or Germany; it was roomier than a plane but harder to type on my laptop.

• Here’s a deep dive on why helium is so hard to replace. MRI machines, semiconductor fabs, fiber optics, and aerospace all use it for reasons that are not easy to swap out, which makes helium supply chains way more critical than I realized before chatting with a friend who works with magnets.

• In happier supply chain news, a Japanese company thinks it can push lithium recovery rates from below 50% to around 90% with a new process. If the process holds up it will be great news for stuff like batteries and electrification and green energy and whatnot.

ICYMI

• The most popular items in Some Stuff I’m Surprisingly Happy I Bought were the vertical wooden pen organizer and the also-vertical TESSAN tower power strip (affiliate links).

• The Konik method for making delicious food is less a recipe system than a way to make everyday cooking easier to improvise and relax about, although I do include five of my most common recipes.

• I also wrote about how organisms rewrite themselves, mostly because I felt bad about slightly misstating how octopuses work in my article about How Locusts Cause Famines and Shaped the Middle East.

• I wrote about building a vocabulary for discussing the network effects. The Cold Start Problem book itself was a great look into how communities, institutions, and businesses get going.

For May, I plan to really focus on my health and step away from my desk as much as possible, but I will still keep up my once a week writing schedule and stay on top of correspondence. Please feel free to reach out, especially if you have a great article or book to recommend!